Body Count diagnoses America's plague of violent crime. Its authors - William Bennett, John DiIulio, and John Walters - define the epidemic's size, its range, and its scope. Through stories and anecdotes they present the very real human tragedies behind the numbers. Most important, they describe the source of violent crime: abject moral poverty, the destitution visited upon children raised without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach right from wrong.

Though dozens of other explanations have been offered for America's horrifying rates of violent crime - from academics and clinicians, cops and social workers, politicians on the right and the left - they are, at best, proxies for the real cause. It is not prisons (or their scarcity), guns (or their excess), the death penalty, the exclusionary rule, or even material impoverishment.

Look to the root of a criminally twisted tree, the authors argue, and you will find only moral poverty and its parasite: drug abuse.

And argue they do, with both powerful rhetoric and rigorous analysis. Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters demolish such myths as economic poverty causes crime; the United States imprisons a disproportionate number of its citizens; drug abuse is a victimless crime...and nothing useful can be done about it anyway; the death penalty is today a major deterrent of crime; and incarceration doesn't work.

Each and every one of these myths is not merely wrong but tragically mistaken. The authors draw upon an immense fund of hard data and offer some of the most serious analysis ever given to America's criminal justice system - a system designed to protect America from violent crime, a system that has, for all practical purposes, failed, with one in three violent crimes committed by a person on either probation, parole, or pre-trial release.

Body Count offers a radically new reading of the problem, proposes controversial but necessary policies at every level of government, profiles cities that are making progress against violent crime, and appeals to responsible citizens from all points on the political compass to join forces in the battle against moral poverty. It is certain to be one of the most read, discussed, and argued about books of the year.