Penalty Enhancement for Hate Crimes: An Economic Analysis

The issue of bias-motivated crimes has attracted consderable attention in recent years. In this paper, we develop an economic framework to analyze penalty enhancements for bias-motivated crimes. We extend the standard model by introducing two different groups of potential victims of crime, and assume that a potential offender's benefits from a crime depend on the group to which the victim belongs. We begin with the assumption that the harm to an individual victim from a bias-motivated crime is identical to that from an equivalent non-hate crime. Nonetheless, we derive the result that a pattern of crimes disproportionately targeting an identifiable group leads to greater social harm. This conclusion follows both from a model where disparities in groups' victimization probabilities lead to social losses due to fairness concerns, as well as a model where potential victims have the opportunity to undertake socially costly victimization avoidance activities. In particular, penalty enhancements can reduce the incentives for avoidance activity, and thereby protect the networks of profitable interactions that link members of different groups. We also argue that those groups that are covered by hate crime statutes tend to be those whose characteristics make it especially likely that penalty enhancement is socially optimal. Finally, we consider a number of other issues related to hate crimes, including teh choice of sanctions from behind a Rawlsian 'veil of ignorance' concerning group identity.

Preservice Teacher Preparation in Meeting the Needs of Gifted and Other Academically Diverse Students

The issue of how to respond to the diverse academic needs of students is one of the central challenges of teaching. This project studied how preservice teachers develop an awareness of the needs of academically diverse learners and how they intend to implement and/or modify instruction to meet those needs. Participants all came from one university. As part of the design of the study, the participants were surveyed to investigate (a) their attitudes and beliefs towards academically diverse learners; (b) the teaching practices they would utilize in response to academic diversity in their classrooms; and (c) the confidence they have in their abilities to identify and address these various needs in their classrooms. Several strategies including activities to enhance creativity, cooperative learning, individual instruction, problem-solving activities, and projects were considered noteworthy for the ratings by the preservice teachers as appropriate for all students. Small differences were found based on the preservice teachers' year of placement in the School of Education, indicating that as students progress through this program, they may learn more about different techniques and when and for whom they are appropriate; however, differences across groups were not statistically significant. Results also indicated that across the different years in the program, preservice teachers did not have very high or very low confidence in addressing these issues in their own classrooms. Each grouping fell around the middle level of confidence.