The Public Interest articles from September 1994

The Public Interest archives from September 1994

The question of black crime.
September 22, 1994... IF WHITE suburbanites were victimized in disproportionate numbers by convicted criminals out on probation or parole, then there would be little policy debate about keeping violent and repeat criminals locked up. Witness the tragic murder of Polly...

Listen to the black community. (comment on article by John DiIulio in this issue, p.3)
September 22, 1994... JOHN DIIULIO'S ESSAY provides a useful summary of the appalling disparity between the rates at which black and white Americans are victimized by violent criminals. The statistics are staggering; the moral and political problems raised by them are...

Prisons in a free society. (comment on article by John DiIulio in this issue, p.3)
September 22, 1994... JOHN DIIULIO HAS BROUGHT our attention back to precisely the points on which it ought always to focus and from which it regularly wanders. He reminds us of who really suffers from crime, how little we know about the ways to prevent it, and how...

A failure of moral conviction? (comment on article by John DiIulio in this issue, p.3)
September 22, 1994... JOHN DIIULIO DESERVES a badge of courage for taking on the often ignored issue of black inner-city crime. American blacks are being victimized in inner cities at record rates but, because the victimizers are black, the subject is taboo. Better to...

No racism in the justice system. (comment on article by John DiIulio in this issue, p.3)
September 22, 1994... WHETHER OR NOT America's criminal justice system is biased against blacks today, it clearly was in the past. Between 1930 and 1964, for example, six southern jurisdictions--Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Virginia, West Virginia, and the...

The importance of deterrence. (comment on article by John DiIulio in this issue, p.3)
September 22, 1994... JOHN DIIULIO'S ARTICLE raises so many interesting questions that one would like to devote an extended commentary to each of them. Take, for example, the matter of crime statistics. A central thesis of DiIulio's article is that crime is not an...

A de-moralized society: the British/American experience.
September 22, 1994... The past is a foreign country," it has been said. But it is not an unrecognizable country. Indeed, we sometimes experience a "shock of recognition" as we confront some aspect of the past in the present. One does not need to have had a Victorian...

A new era for public utilities.
September 22, 1994... THE ELECTRIC UTILITY industry has come a long way since the early 1970s. The idea that its pricing structures should be based on economic principles, rather than merely reflect attempts to cross-subsidize this or that politically potent customer...

School choice slandered. (Milwaukee Parental Choice Program)
September 22, 1994... THE WAR OVER private school choice is entering what might be called a paradoxical phase. As the number of cities and states debating some variant of vouchers proliferates, hard evidence of vouchers' effect rides on the outcome of an experiment...

Why babies die in D.C. (part 2)(includes reply by original author)
September 22, 1994... IN THE SPRING 1994 ISSUE of The Public Interest (Number 115), Nicholas Eberstadt argued that the high rate of low birth-weight births and infant mortality among African Americans in Washington, D.C., is due mainly to high rates of illegitimacy...

Dada and Surrealist Performance, 2d ed.
September 22, 1994... ANYONE WHO THINKS that fatuousness, nonsense, and obscenity in the arts are wholly recent, NEA-sponsored affairs should look back for a moment at some of the numerous avant-garde movements that captured headlines in Europe from the turn of the...

The Hungry Soul.
September 22, 1994... NATURE IS BACK. For most of this century, such terms as "natural law," "natural right," and "human nature"--the basis of American political thought from the Declaration of Independence through the end of the nineteenth century--were banished from...

Honest Opportunism: The Rise of the Career Politician.
September 22, 1994... A THIRTEEN YEAR OLD sat in the visitors' gallery, listened to a legislative debate, and vowed to himself that he would return one day as a member. Three years later, he was working his neighborhood door-to-door as a political activist. "He...

Recovering American Literature.
September 22, 1994... IT IS DIFFICULT for the general reader today to grasp what has happened to academic literary criticism. Picking up at random the kind of book typically published by university presses these days, the non-specialist is likely to be put off by both...