The tidal wave of superpredators never arrived. Instead, juvenile crime plummeted. But seizing upon DiIulio's incendiary predictions and prescriptions, politicians in both political parties created their own tidal wave -- a tidal wave of unforgiving punishment. Harsh juvenile prison sentences, the incarceration of teenagers, massive expansion of juvenile prisons: All were propelled forward by DiIulio's superpredator theory.

Now John DiIulio -- his academic chair shifted from Princeton to Penn -- is back, in a public-policy role at least as controversial: He is director, and the intellectual guiding force, behind the Bush administration's new White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. His job, as he put it on CBS's "The Early Show" this week, is to cultivate "a little government friendliness" toward social-service programs based in communities of worship.

I have my own minor history with DiIulio. Back in 1995 I wrote a long article critical of his "wolf pack" theory and his analysis of crime; DiIulio responded with a furious letter to the editor, denouncing me as anti-Italian because I compared his theories to the views of a liberal police chief who also happened to be of Italian-American extraction. Then a few months later I met DiIulio at a public-policy forum in which he talked about finding common ground between liberals and conservatives on crime -- a stance that startled me given his inflammatory rhetoric up to that point. Afterward I introduced myself, expecting the usual sardonic dance between a journalist and aggrieved subject. Instead he smiled warmly: "God bless you," DiIulio said, and it was without a trace of sarcasm.

I've watched DiIulio's evolution -- that search for common ground -- with interest. By the end of the 1990s, he was disillusioned by the national punishment regime he had helped inspire, arguing in the Wall Street Journal and scholarly publications for investment in community-based youth programs instead of more prison cells. His conservatism turned away from penology and instead into research promoting the success of social service outreach by African-American churches. Last year he edited a book on religion in American life with the decidedly liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne.

DiIulio's new White House appointment prompts an interesting question: Are his new policy prescriptions -- for broader government partnership in social services by churches, synagogues and mosques -- any better founded or any more reliable than his wolf-pack predictions? What the new DiIulio calls "a little government friendliness" toward religious charities has civil libertarians -- and some religious denominations -- alarmed about breaches in the church-state wall. DiIulio says the plan is designed to "level the playing field" between sacred and secular; Laura Murphy, the ACLU's Washington office director, calls the new plan "a faith-based prescription for discrimination." The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, warns that the Bush-DiIulio plan threatens to create "a giant, new kind of conglomerate bureaucracy of church and state sitting in the White House."

I'm a die-hard civil libertarian. But I've also lived and reported in inner cities for the last two decades and find the question more vexed -- and vexing -- than either DiIulio's reassuring rhetoric or the ACLU's abstract invocation of principle.

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