Penalty Enhancement for Hate Crimes: An Economic Analysis

This article develops an economic analysis of penalty enhancementsfor bias-motivated (or "hate") crimes. Our model allows potentialoffenders' benefits from a crime to depend on the victim's groupidentity, and assumes that potential victims have the opportunityto undertake socially costly victimization avoidance activities.We derive the result that a pattern of crimes disproportionatelytargeting an identifiable group leads to greater social harm(even when the harm to an individual victim from a bias-motivatedcrime is identical to that from an equivalent non–hatecrime). In addition, we consider a number of other issues relatedto hate crime laws.