John J. DiIulio, Jr., director, Center for Public Management, Brookings Institution, and professor, Princeton University, delivered the tenth in AEI's 1995-1996 Bradley Lecture Series June 10 in Washington, D.C. Excerpts follow.

Philadelphia Police officer Pat Doyle and his wife Nancy made their biggest sacrifice to the community when their twenty-one-year-old son, Danny, a police rookie, was killed by a drug-using, gun-toting, streetwise repeat felon.

Danny Boyle's killer did not act alone; he was aided by a justice system that delivers plea bargains in more than 90 percent of all cases, fails to incarcerate 47 percent of felons convicted of a violent crime, and releases those violent convicts who do go to prison before they have served even half their time in confinement.

As a result, much of the violent crime committed in this country is a social wound inflicted by the failure of the justice system to restrain known street criminals. By permitting so much revolving door justice, we may yet rob ourselves and our children of the basic freedom to live as citizens without constant fear, and, in the end, rob ourselves of representative democracy itself.

The stability of our democracy depends on the willingness and capacity of each citizen to work within and be disciplined by the representative system itself. There are, to be sure, many areas of contemporary governance where a persistent majority of citizens disagree with the incumbent policies of their representative system. But the size of the disagreement with respect to crime and punishment is our democracy's opinion-policy Grand Canyon.

Only one public institution has consistently elicited less public confidence and trust than Congress, namely, the criminal justice system.

The fears of the American people are supported by facts. Actual time served by convicted felons is less than four years, while only three in ten violent juvenile offenders make their way to adult courts.

To set right the relationship between violent crime and representative democracy, we must make a concerted effort to denormalize violent crime, reversing a process, observed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, by which we come to treat as normal levels of costly social ills that would have been intolerable in an earlier period. We must confront the true crime statistics and demand that the press do the same.

We have found that in the l990s, more than 90 percent of state prisoners were violent offenders or recidivists and the median number of crimes committed in the year before their imprisonment was twelve, excluding drug crimes. The criminality of these prisoners gets defined down by unchallenged "experts" who focus only on the felon's latest or most serious crimes. The way to define prisoners' criminality up is to focus on the totality of the crimes committed by the criminals as adults and juveniles.

If advocates of defining criminality down have their way, a decade from now we will find normalized even the behavior of preteen superpredators. If we let that happen, the street crime of today, in retrospect, will look like a golden age. We will get what we deserve.

Solutions that Congress could undertake include requiring the Justice Department to release its annual report on the number of prisoners on the same date as its report on record probation and parole populations; requiring the Justice Department to maintain data on the custody status of convicted murders and on the ages of rape victims; and mandating that the State Department submit annual data on numbers and percentages of violent crimes committed yearly by paroled felons as well as relevant facts on their victims. Congress should also take up the Victims Rights Amendment. The debate could help to expose the truth about crime without punishment in America, the plight of crime victims, and the dangers of continuing to define criminality down.

When we define criminality down, we diminish not only our will and capacity to respond as we should in punishing convicted felons but also our will and capacity to protect innocent, at-risk children. A society that is governed in ways that numb our natural outrage at those who have done criminal wrong is inevitably a society that is governed in ways that dull our natural compassion for those who have done nothing wrong.

This is put-up-or-shut-up time for conservatives and other Americans who are truly concerned about reviving civil society during a period of government retrenchment. A key to resolving the nation's violent crime and representative democracy dilemma is to empower the residents of our nation's big cities, empower them not with government programs and funds but with voluntary efforts, with private contributions, and with our respect and our prayers.