do hate crime enhancements deter crime?

If they do, I can't find any good research that proves it.

Consider the DOJ's own report, "A Policymaker's Guide to Hate Crimes." [pdf] Even if the numbers, nationally, appear to follow any sort of trend since the inception of hate crime enhancements, any potential causality is likely ruled out by intervening variables--population growth, other anti-crime legislation, differences in enforcement, and differences in data gathering. The latter is even more complicated:

...even if all States were reporting these incidents it would be difficult to gauge the level of the hate crime problem in this country because bias-motivated crimes typically are underreported by both law enforcement agencies and victims.

I'm still searching, though. If you find quality research done in the past couple years that shows a clear effect, send it along. Otherwise, unless you have good data, stay away from the deterrence argument on the Neg for the current resolution.

nat quals, and nothing but nat quals

From yesterday afternoon until sometime Saturday, once all the IEs and debate rounds are done. Actually, the title is a little misleading: I have to teach all day today, too.

Yesterday's tacky tie elicited a "Hey, dig that cool tie" from an older coach. Momentarily felled by nostalgia, he noted, "I must have a couple hundred of those in my closet."

Me, too.

Oh, and maybe my wife can visit for our leapiversary. Four years ago today, we had our first date, burgers and fries at Norma's in Lacey. Amid the first of our marathon conversations, she'd pause to sing along with the Beach Boys. From moment one, I knew she was right for me.

due date

March 31st.

By March 31st, my National Board assemblage of analyzed, scrutinized, and pulverized entries, borne in a box and lathered in labels, must be stamped with the mark of the USPS or a private carrier. Then it will fly to some warehouse in Middle America, to be unpacked and dispersed to its evaluators, never to return.

By March 31st, I hope to kick this nasty, nasty cold.

By March 31st, I will have rounded out the debate season, with two national qualifiers and two state tournaments done and done, leaving only one free weekend between now and then. By "free," I mean "free to fill with National Board completion-type activities."

By March 31st, I will repeat daily, If I don't pass this time, I can live with myself. I will not believe this.

By March 31st, I'll have turned 29, passed the four-year anniversary of dating my wife, visited family for Easter, seen the end of my dad's tenure in Elma, witnessed the coming of spring, finished The Odyssey again, reached my 3,000th post, and added sixteen new gray hairs, but only in my beard.

By March 31st, I will be thoroughly insane.

Larry Norman dead at 60

The father of Christian rock left us far too soon. I can still sing "Heee's an unidintifiiiied flyin' awwbject" in my best Larry Norman nasal tone, thanks to my parents' scandalous LP of In Another Land.

So long, Larry. (Christian) rock and roll will never be the same.




Update: Today's tie added for irony's sake.

school district deadline approaches

Last time we checked, the Olympia School District had received two geographically valid applications for its vacant seat. The number's now up to three.

You have until Thursday, Feb. 28 to throw yourself headlong into the winds of fate. What are you waiting for?

you will drink Pepsi

Sweet news: the beverage of all beverages will soon be loved, nay, demanded by all. Science!

an Oscar for best adapted cultural event?

This morning, my freshfolks warmed up with a brief writing prompt, as we are wont to do. The two-part question:

1. If a movie were made about your life, what would it be called?
2. Which Oscar® would it win, and why?

Mine would be titled There Will Be Blood, and it would win a Best Supporting Actor for the Gillette Mach 3 Turbo's portrayal of a crimson-stained razor tired of fighting stubble. The title scene comes midway through, as the Turbo takes out its rage on my Adam's apple.

I told one of my most fatigued first-period students that he was ready for his close-up in A Beautiful Nap.

different state, different hate: variations in hate crime enhancements

Writing 11 years after Wisconsin v. Mitchell paved the Constitutional path for hate crime legislation, Sara Steen and Mark Cohen, in the March 2004 issue of Justice Quarterly, in "Assessing the Public's Demand for Hate Crime Penalties," describe the nuances of hate crime laws from state to state. First, they differ in definition.

Hate crime laws are notoriously problematic because they target particular offender motivations. To enforce these laws, law enforcement officials must have some access to an offender's motive for committing a crime. The requirements for proof of motive differ from state to state, with some states requiring evidence that the offender targeted the victim out of prejudice, bigotry, or hostility for a group of which the victim was a member, and others requiring only evidence that the offender intentionally selected his or her victim from a particular group.

Not only do states vary in their definition of what constitutes a hate crime, but they vary in the number of protected classes. Not all states, for example, include sexual orientation. A handy chart of varying categories is provided here [pdf].

Last, punishment enhancements differ greatly.

Some states impose mandatory minimums for hate crimes, while others mandate the addition of a set amount of time (e.g., two years) to a sentence if a crime was motivated by hate. Still others multiply a sentence (e.g., doubling or even tripling it) or require that the offense be classified at a level of seriousness that is higher than the level for the underlying offense.

In the absence of federal legislation clearly mandating a specific form of hate crime statute, or acceptable forms of punishment, or the proper designation of protected classes, it's up to the states, as "laboratories of democracy," to work out their own laws, while Is this just? That's for you to decide--and argue.

North Thurston's levy failure: projected consequences

The recent defeat of North Thurston's maintenance and operations levy may mean stiff cuts in personnel and services, The Olympian reports.

Levy money represents 16 percent of the district's budget, and without that money, the district will have to cut $17.5 million in programs and staff, said Shawn Lewis, assistant superintendent of administrative services.

That would mean cutting 77 teachers and other certified staff members and 100 classified and administrative staff members, such as secretaries and principals, he said.

The district also would have to cut extracurricular programs and eliminate or consolidate programs that aren't required by the state.

Construction of the elementary school set to open in the Horizon Pointe neighborhood in fall 2009 likely would be delayed, Lewis said.

The district will have meetings in March, at which people can list their priorities of what programs should be saved or eliminated.

The other option on the table is a second levy at a lower rate in May, which would still require some cuts, just not as deep.

Wouldn't it be grand if every "no" voter would call their legislator, pressuring them to change our state's inequitable funding structure?

hate crime enhancements and plea bargaining

Reading this Village Voice article on a particular hate crime negotiation, I was struck by an aspect of the law that I should have seen earlier. Hate crime enhancements, in certain circumstances, greatly increase the bargaining power of the prosecution. Which brings us right back to the plea bargaining debate.

LDers arguing the hate crime resolution should check out the article, which not only illuminates this issue, but provides a concrete example of the difficulty of defining the law's protected classes.

varieties of retributivism

The current resolution concerns the appropriateness of punishment for hate crimes. One fruitful avenue for a criterion is retributivism, either on the Affirmative or Negative. The core of retributivism: that the guilty are punished because they deserve it, not because of any future considerations. That said, there are two major forms of retributivism, as Clare Finkelstein, in "Death and Retribution," found in the Summer 2002 edition of Criminal Justice Ethics, sees it. Both are attempts to wrestle with the implications of lex talionis, Latin shorthand for the concept of "an eye for an eye." How literally should we take the phrase?

Not very. Our first option, then,

...distributes punishments proportionately, so that the worst crimes are matched with the worst penalties, and so on down the line. This method dictates only relative levels of desert, rather than requiring any particular objective measure of what criminal acts deserve what treatment. We might call this version of retributivism the "proportionate penalty" theory.

Note that the ceiling comes first: choose the most serious offense, define the most serious possible punishment, and work downward. The problem, then, is what criterion we use to justify the most serious punishment. Is it death? Torture? Isolation? Attending a Hannah Montana concert?

There's another option.

The second, and more promising strategy is to attempt to establish a moral equivalence between crimes and permissible punishments. This strategy asserts that the perpetrator should suffer an amount equivalent to the harm or moral evil inflicted on the victim, but the kind of harm or moral evil involved need not match. That is, instead of either assigning the same harm or evil as punishment that the offender inflicted on his victim, or fixing penalties proportionately by making sure that the right intervals obtain between levels of punishments, we can match crimes with punishments on an absolute scale, but establish only a rough moral equivalence between the two. We would seek to inflict on the perpetrator by way of punishment the nearest morally permissible form of punishment to the act the perpetrator committed. Let us call this version of retributivism the "moral equivalence" theory of justified punishment.

Finkelstein traces this idea back to Kant. It suffers from a similar problem; we need to determine exactly how to correlate, say, a fine with a felony. We have a reason for doing so, but not a method.

Any debater running up against a retributivist case should ask some tough questions in CX about justifying particular punishments. These options provide a way out, but not a destination. That's up to you.

a Rawlsian approach to punishment

John Rawls, though setting out a liberal theory of justice, stopped short of justifying a particular view of punishment. Still, Sharon Dolovich is convinced that we can use the Rawlsian veil of ignorance to legitimize punishment in a liberal society. LDers contemplating the current hate crime resolution might take note of her article, "Legitimate Punishment in a Liberal Democracy," found in the Buffalo Criminal Law Review, available online [pdf].

Dolovich first warrants the use of deliberation in the "original position," in contrast to most punitive schemes, which operate in an ex post framework.* She writes,

[I]t is a basic assumption of the argument I develop--and indeed, of liberal democracy itself--that all members of society are moral equals, entitled to due consideration and respect as fellow human beings and fellow citizens. From this assumption, it does not follow that all citizens are entitled to equal treatment. To the contrary, by their actions, individuals may forfeit certain goods that other citizens enjoy. But on the theory of liberalism I adopt here, forfeiture in this sense does not negate an individual’s moral status: he or she is still a subject of justice, entitled to consideration as such.

This means that any legitimate theory of punishment necessitates the prior deliberation ("behind the veil") of those who, someday, will flout the law. Why should we allow the possibility that a reasonable deliberator might err when in the "real world?" Three reasons, Dolovich argues. First, imperfect legal sanctions mean that sometimes innocents will be punished. Second, people are people, and people make mistakes. Third, the unequal distribution of resources means that certain worse-off members will be more prone to commit crimes simply due to circumstances. (It is important to recognize that even a just society in a Rawlsian sense is not perfectly equal.)

Dolovich spends pages analyzing some of the potential results of the behind-the-veil deliberations, and the principles of just punishment that would result.

1. There shall be no incarceration for non-serious offenses, unless doing so would appreciably deter the commission of serious offenses.
2. Punishments of incarceration, when imposed for serious offenses, may be only as severe as necessary to appreciably deter offenses causing harm of equal or greater severity (the parsimony principle).
3. Before any punishment may be imposed, its deterrent effect must be shown to be reasonably certain or imminent, on the basis of standards and modes of reasoning acceptable to all.
4. Consistent with these principles, the state must do all it can to reform the criminal justice system in order to reduce as much as possible the danger of convicting the innocent or retaining them in custody.

The parsimony principle is central to concerns of proportionality, and relies on both retributivism for its moral grounding and utilitarian considerations for its deliberative outcome; in other words, the original architects of a legitimate punitive system would know that crime deserves punishment, but would look to deterrence considerations for determining the proper proportion, because of the three qualifications on human conduct listed above. Ultimately, the needs of the law-abiding set the ceiling for punishment, as Dolovich argues:

If any punishment is to be legitimately imposed, those parties advocating its imposition must demonstrate convincingly, in terms that all could be expected to accept, that this imposition on the security and integrity of targets of punishment is immediately necessary or at least reasonably certain to result in greater protection for the law-abiding.

Though Dolovich doesn't list them specifically, hate crime enhancements, which often carry mandatory minimums, may run afoul of the parsimony principle.

If legislatures are to honor this principle, they must maintain the flexibility to rethink sentences in particular cases, or indeed to rethink the whole legislative approach to punishing certain offenses when the circumstances demand such reevaluation. Of particular concern in this regard are omnibus mandatory sentencing schemes which lump together a range of offenses and prescribe the same minimum sentence for each. Such schemes preclude the possibility for the focused consideration of the characteristics of each offense and the likely deterrent effect of the prescribed punishment which application of the principles demands.

Last, I should emphasize a few things. First, this summary of some of Dolovich's core arguments hardly begins to describe the complexities of her arguments, which is why I've linked to the original. Second, these arguments are Dolovich's, and not Rawls'. Finally, the advantage of a Rawlsian framework is its grounding in democratic principles. Theories such as utilitarianism and retributivism do not always clearly define the role of the state in providing punishment, especially in a state where laws are democratically created and changed. Whether hate crime enhancements meet Dolovitz's ideal is a matter for the affirmative--and negative--to consider.



*Sharp-eyed readers will note that, over at the other post, I originally thought that Rawls wouldn't "come near this resolution." I was partly right: not Rawls, but a Rawlsian, changed my mind.

spring isn't here

But that doesn't mean you can't herald its approach. How about with a celebratory lockdown?

The suspect reportedly entered the Columbia Bank at 2920 Harrison Avenue Northwest at around 10 a.m. and displayed a handgun as he demanded money from the teller, police spokesman Dick Machlan said.

He fled on foot with the cash toward an apartment complex next to the bank, but a subsequent search of the area that involved a K9 unit failed to locate the suspect.

For about 45 minutes, my advisory class sat in darkness near the inside wall, taking naps and chatting quietly about There Will Be Blood and the magic that is Daniel Day-Lewis. I totally called the bank robbery angle.

When they announced the lockdown's conclusion, saying that the search had been called off, I told students it was because the cops had probably caught the bad guy.

Nope.

Thurston County 2008 primary results

Update 5/20: If you're searching for the results of the May 20th special levy: it passed.




As far as local schools go, with 8000 ballots left to count, results were mixed. Olympia's levy passed, as did Griffin's, Rainier's, Tenino's, and Tumwater's. Unfortunately, Rochester, Yelm, and North Thurston, and Centralia didn't benefit from the recent change requiring only a simple majority. A possible explanation: the explosive growth in and around those cities, which has driven up property values and, thus, property taxes.

Update: Yelm and Rochester are cloooooose, but still losing, with another scheduled for 8:00 p.m. tomorrow. I should also point out that Centralia's largest vote concentration comes from Lewis County, correcting my erroneous assessment that the Centralia levy had failed. Duh.

National races: In Thurston County, McCain beat the protest, and Obama got some symbolic love from local Democrats.

Update 2/21: North Thurston's expected loss is especially painful:

Board members also will meet Saturday to discuss $16 million to $17 million in cuts to extracurricular programs the levy pays for, such as athletics, foreign languages, music and drama.

The measure may come back for a May vote.

Update 2/21 part II: Still 5,000 votes left to count. The Yelm race is narrowly in favor, but the Rochester levy has swung negative. It's going down to the wire.

Also, Olympian readers discuss the failure of the North Thurston levy. A sample:

I believe that school levies are not well-explained to the public. In most cases the intent is to continue a previously levy that is expiring but that is not made clear in the promotion, which can lead voters to think that the levy represents a new tax. Secondly, levies should clearly outline what the funds will be used for. Diana Larsen-Mills, Olympia

one giant drum solo

With some nifty guitar, keyboard, and fiddle work over top. The Dixie Dregs play "The Wabash" at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Fun stuff.

[via Jon Rowe]

still need a majority

Ryan is right: by and large, the simple majority measure boosted schools all across the state.

Makes losing even harder for those who still couldn't muster the requisite 50.01%. Blame it on underwhelming electioneering, rising property values and taxes, or, in some cases, the lingering effects of the deluge. Sorry, Rochester, Centralia, and Yelm. (Oh, and let's not forget Lacey, home to the North Thurston district, another victim of booming development, I'm guessing.)

Update: Centralia passed. In my haste, I forgot to check the Lewis County results, where most of that district's constituents live. Good for them, and duh for me.

nerd mashups to the extreme

From Russian woodcuts of sci-fi classics, to the Manga Bible. (Approved by Rowan Williams!) What's next? ASCII-animated Star Wars?

(Just kidding. It's already been done.)




Added: Today's tacky tie.

why hate crime enhancements are just: six reasons

Christopher Heath Wellman, in "A Defense of Stiffer Penalties for Hate Crimes," found in the Spring 2006 edition of Hypatia, helpfully outlines six (6!) potential criteria for determining the proper scope and aim of justice. Each one, according to his reckoning, justifies hate crime enhancements, the focus of the March / April resolution. Let's see how.

First up: Safety Valve theory, in which criminal justice provides an outlet for social tensions caused by injustice.

Nowhere is this release of societal pressure more important than in cases where divisions within society have led to bias crimes. The stakes are raised so dramatically with hate crimes because, to the extent that members of the target group identify with the victim, each is personally slighted by the crime and thus has much more than an impartial interest in seeing justice done. Thus, whereas only an individual and perhaps her friends and family will be personally invested in an average criminal's penalty, an entire marked group will typically yearn for a hate criminal to receive her just desert.

I see this as the weakest potential reason for supporting stiffer penalties, which is likely why Wellman addresses it first.

Second, Restitution, a form of justice in which the primary goal is for the perpetrator to "make things right" for the victim and the community. ("Restorative justice" is a synonym.)

I suggest that hate crimes require enhanced penalties because, more than other transgressions, hate crimes claim vicarious victims.... Without diminishing the fact that the primary victim is often devastated as no one else could be, I want to stress that others are importantly, if vicariously, made victims because of their identification with the victim and the effect this identification has upon their sense of belonging, and even security, in society....

Thus, even without asserting that hate crimes are especially damaging to their primary victims, one can cite the real losses of secondary victims to explain why the restoration made necessary by hate crimes is more substantial than that by ordinary crimes. Put simply, hate crimes leave so much pain and degradation in their wake that, in order to restore both the primary and secondary victims, society must employ extraordinary measures to affirm all those who have been degraded. In such circumstances, ordinary criminal censure will not do.

The Affirmative would have to show why extra punishment in any way "restores" the situation; it is unclear why or how a 20-year versus a 10-year sentence would dull the pain or relieve the degradation suffered by victims--since many views of restoration require some sort of forgiveness on the part of the offender (and in some views, the victims).

The Expressivist view of justice comes next: that the purpose of the justice system is to "send a message" to the criminal, and society, that crime is wrong.

As indicated above, a hate crime can serve as a poignant announcement to all members of the targeted group that they are despised, hunted, and vulnerable. Indeed, part of what attracts hate criminals to these horrific acts is the opportunity to express contempt, not just for the particular victim, but for the entire group to which the victim belongs. Unfortunately, this expression is all too often received loud and clear. Proponents of the expressivist theory of punishment are in a position to recognize that hate crimes send these messages and suggest that the criminal law can be used to counter this message.... Given that the criminal law is an important expression of a society's values, it follows that we should want more severe penalties for those crimes that we deem to be more serious.

This is similar in import to the "Moral Education" view of justice, in which justice is meant to educate society in matters of right and wrong.

Since chauvinism and xenophobia are some of the most personally and socially destructive moral vices undermining contemporary society, there are compelling reasons to harness the criminal law's power to shape the general public's values in the campaign against group hatred. In sum, both because hate criminals have revealed themselves to be particularly in need of moral education, and because our criminal code is an educative instrument for society at large, moral education theorists have reason to lobby for enhanced penalties for hate crimes.

Wellman covers the Utilitarian view fifth, which encompasses some of the previous considerations (such as moral education, which has societal benefits). A utilitarian view of justice, as I've mentioned before, is forward-looking, and is mostly concerned with the costs and benefits of punishment to society as a whole. (For LD, utility as a criterion often links to a value of societal welfare.) Why does utilitarianism justify hate crime enhancements?

In short, as the cost of a crime rises, a utilitarian will be more concerned to deter it and will therefore want a more severe punishment. Since hate crimes cause profound social division and unrest, as well as create more pain for a greater number of victims, they are extremely costly. Thus, although a utilitarian might invoke any number of considerations to defend stiffer penalties for hate crimes, one basic and distinctively consequential line of reasoning stands out: the magnified harmfulness of hate crimes gives us reason to attach more severe penalties to those found guilty of committing them.

Last, Wellman tackles the retributivist view, which requires the most complex argumentation. He sees two major ways hate crimes might be more reprehensible--if they are inherently worse either in action ("actus reus") or intent ("mens rea"), thus justifying stricter punishment.

The explanation as to why the actus reus in a hate crime is particularly bad is straightforward. As outlined above, bias crimes are especially harmful because of the vicarious victims they claim and the psychological distress and social unrest they leave in their wake. And, just as a person who steals one thousand dollars commits a worse act (other things being equal) than someone who steals one hundred, the additional harms involved in bias crimes make the acts worse than they would be otherwise. Clearly, then, proponents of retributivism need cite only the magnified badness of the act in a hate crime to show why bias criminals are especially culpable and thus deserve to be punished more.

Wellman sees this as sufficient to establish the retributivist case, but also covers the other angle. However, this is where he finds himself on weaker ground, considering murder-for-prejudice worse than murder-for-hire as "self-evident" to most people. This is hardly intuitive; someone who is so devious and sociopathic as to kill a stranger for money might be an even less moral than someone who chooses only a specific class of victim. Wellman has an answer, though, considering Ally the hired gun, and Barry the racist killer.

[W]e are liable to lament Barry's act as particularly pointless. As depraved as Ally is for valuing $10,000 more than a person's life, Barry is worse because he regards the act of killing not as a means to some other end, but as an end in itself. He kills simply to indulge his irrational hatred, merely for the satisfaction of killing a Jewish person. Thus, without minimizing our disgust for Ally, there is plenty of room to regard Barry's state of mind as more vicious than Ally's. And, because retributivists assign punishments in accordance with the moral depravity of the criminal, Barry's more reprehensible state of mind explains why he deserves to be punished more strenuously than Ally.

Wellman does not explain why the pleasure Barry acquires from killing is morally worse than the pleasure obtainable from Ally's $10,000 (which, in putting a specific dollar value on a life, could be described as equally as dehumanizing, if not moreso). In fact, Ally's motives are assumed to be "pure," in the sense that her desire for cash is purportedly all that drives her. Potentially, Ally is every bit as psychopathic as Barry, and is simply happy to find someone who will subsidize her psychopathy.

Wellman could strengthen his argument by simply equating the two situations, and saying that each deserves a stiffer punishment. Murder for no apparent reason would be the test case.

At any rate, a Negative can choose any (or some) of the views of justice listed above in order to show that hate crime enhancements are just. Affirmatives should, of course, prepare counterarguments.

As always, your comments and questions are welcome.

don't forget to vote

I'm with The Olympian on this one: just because the parties are making you sign a loyalty oath, just because Luke Esser will hand-pick the GOP nominee no matter how you vote, just because the Democratic primary is a "beauty contest," don't throw your ballot away. There's another election that matters even more.

Levies all across the South Sound are up for approval. Your support means financial stability in turbulent times, despite an inequitable state funding formula that our legislature refuses to tackle, year after year. Until schools win their lawsuit, the most likely avenue for success means voting Yes on Tuesday, February 19.

Yes means we can keep class sizes reasonable, we can keep programs active, we can keep quality teachers in the classroom.

Don't forget to vote tomorrow. And, more important, vote Yes.

baseball nerdliness

1. The Mariners are being taken over by French-Canadian pitchers.

"He didn't really recognize me, so I said, 'Hey, I'm Phillippe.' And he was like, 'Oh, you're Aumont.' And then we just started talking French to each other."

That night, Aumont said, the pair went out to a nearby restaurant and "got to know each other a little bit better."

Not that it's such a bad thing.

2. They'll be under the guidance of Mel Stottlemyre and Norm Charlton.

Last year, the Seattle pitching staff ranked in the bottom third among MLB clubs in ERA, strikeouts and quality starts, and it surrendered far too many two-strike hits for McLaren's liking. When Stottlemyre and Charlton sat down in the offseason and discussed priorities, two things immediately came to mind. They wanted their pitchers to focus on: (1) throwing strike one and (2) pitching inside.

For the sake of cosmic irony, I'm hoping we pitch our way past the Yankees into the World Series.

3. Tom Glavine and John Smoltz, together again.

But in the first-base dugout at Disney, Tom Glavine found precisely one camera waiting for him (manned by ESPN.com's own intrepid Anthony Spadacenta) -- and just about zero representatives of the non-Georgia portion of our nation's media.

Sheesh, in New York, the beer vendors draw bigger media hordes than this.

But even though Glavine turns 42 years old in five weeks, even though his five-year stay in New York ended badly, his return to Atlanta deserves more attention than it got.

For the sake of cosmic irony, I'm hoping they pitch their way past the Mets into the World Series. I won't even mind if they win.

4. Robo-scouts will one day dominate sabermetrics.

Feeding high-resolution images of the exact location of every ball hit into the field and the play resulting from each ball into a computer model, Shane Jensen of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has evaluated the defensive fielding performance of all major league baseball players relative to the league average.

Eventually the human interpretive part--the part that tends to screw things up--will be entirely passé. Only then will it be safe to wager on sports.