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Yet other students of the inner city are more pessimistic. "All the basic elements that spawn teenage crime are still in place, and in many cases the indicators are worse," says Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing Grace, an examination of poverty in the South Bronx. "There's a dramatic increase of children in foster care, and that's a very high-risk group of kids. We're not creating new jobs, and we're not improving education to suit poor people for the jobs that exist."
Can anything defuse the demographic time bomb? Fox urges "reinvesting in children": improving schools, creating after-school programs and providing other alternatives to gangs and drugs. DiIulio, a law-and-order conservative, advocates tougher prosecution and wants to strengthen religious institutions to instill better values. Yet he opposes the Gingrich-led effort to make deep cuts in social programs. "A failure to maintain existing welfare and health commitment for kids," he says, "is to guarantee that the next wave of juvenile predators will be even worse than we're dealing with today." DiIulio urges fellow conservatives to think of Medicaid not as a health-care program but as "an anticrime policy.''
--By Richard Zoglin. Reported by Sam Allis/Boston and Ratu Kamlani/New York
COLOR PHOTO: REMI BENALI--GAMMA LIAISON FOR TIME Princeton's John DiIulio warns of "superpredators"