Bush adviser John DiIulio

Joe Pesci with a Ph.D.

At home in classroom - on Street

CLAUDE R. MARX / AP 30jan01

WASHINGTON -- John DiIulio, named Monday to head the White House office of religion-based community initiatives, is an Ivy League political scientist who spends as much time on the streets as in the seminar room.

A colleague describes him as ``Joe Pesci with a Ph.D.''

Comparisons to movie actors aside, DiIulio is a 42-year old scholar of public policy who holds an endowed professorship at the University of Pennsylvania and has written or co-written 12 books.

He often ventures outside the classroom to test his theories. DiIulio helped devise and run a program in Boston that is credited in part with a 77 percent decline in youth homicides there during the 1990s.

The program includes in-school truancy courts; intensified probation through tighter supervision and stricter enforcement, and mentor-based counseling. Young people have access to religious counseling, but it isn't mandatory.

``In his dealings with us, he showed himself to be intuitively shrewd and very tough and have a brilliant street sense,'' said the Rev. Eugene D. Rivers, who worked closely with DiIulio on the program. Rivers is the one who said, ``Think Joe Pesci with a Ph.D.''

DiIulio said he sees his new job as expanding the efforts of groups that already are helping the less fortunate.

``There are so many religious and secular community-based organizations out there that are really working to improve the life prospects of children, youth and families, and otherwise lift up those in this society who haven't done as well as many of us,'' he said. ``We're really talking about, you know, letting faith-based organizations compete for this help on the same basis as any other non-governmental provider.''

William J. Bennett, a former education secretary who co-wrote a book with DiIulio on crime and drug policy, said DiIulio rarely minces words.

``His style is direct, straight on, full bore,'' Bennett said. ``Though he has rounded off some of the edges, no one would confuse him for a dandy.''

It is a style developed on the streets of South Philadelphia, a white, working class part of the city where DiIulio grew up. His father was a sheriff's deputy and his mother sold furniture at a local department store.

DiIulio won a partial scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and financed the rest of his education working a range of jobs, including house painting and construction. He earned a doctorate in government at Harvard University and wrote his dissertation on prison management.

DiIulio's early work, which he continued after being hired to teach at Princeton University, focused on crime prevention. He was a strong advocate of building more prisons and mandatory imprisonment. He still favors strong punishment, but now places more emphasis on prevention, with a religious tilt.

In a 1996 column for The New York Times, he said the best approach to reducing crime among young people included ``enacting more effective gun-control and drug-abuse laws and sentencing violent teen-agers to long prison terms. But even then we would have millions of children whose spiritual and material conditions demand our attention.''

His writings have sometimes brought controversy. In 1996, he described the most dangerous youth offenders as ``superpredators'' and was criticized as being unnecessarily provocative.

``It got people's attention and angered some. But sometimes you need to do this to mobilize people,'' said James Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University.

• http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/polisci/faculty/bios/diiuli.html