Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

by Caroline Fraser

The book, whose inherent racism is debated and debunked, is published at a moment of overweening concern about crime. It feeds into a growing concern over “superpredators,” a term coined by conservative writer John Dilulio in a 1995 essay in the neoconservative The Weekly Standard and adopted by Hillary Clinton. The article expatiates on “violent drug kingpins” and “urban street criminals” growing up in what is described as moral poverty, “fatherless, Godless, and jobless.”[29] Dilulio bases his analysis of “scientific kiddie-crime literature” on a study of ten thousand boys born in 1945 and living in Philadelphia, a year when a third of males between ten and eighteen had at least one arrest.[30] The author appears to be unaware that in 1945 Philadelphia was the smelter capital of the country or that neighborhoods such as East Baltimore are being called “Zombieland” because one in five children there have lead poisoning.[31]