Of the many functions of punishment in a democratic society, consider two extremes: punishment as a means of controlling crime, and punishment as a means of just deserts. The former is concerned with altering the behavior of individual criminals so as to achieve the desired social end of lower...

President Hasselmo, Dean Schuh, Mrs. Wilkins, Dr. Hooks, out-of-town guests, distinguished visitors, colleagues and friends. Roy Wilkins devoted his life to the battle for human rights and so­cial justice. His vision of racial equality guided the NAACP's suc­cessful efforts to break down many...

An informal discussion among a group of black graduate students in economics at M.I.T. on plans to relate the tools and concepts we were learning to other black students evolved into a continued debate on the role of the black scholar, particularly the black economist, in the survival of black...

Using data from 1996, 1998, and 1999 Minnesota comprehensive statewide testing of eighth graders, we examine whether Black students perform worse than White students because Blacks re more likely to attend high-poverty schools. We find the impacts of school poverty on Black students' test scores...

The law concerning racial discrimination in punishment has never been established clearly in legislation. Instead, through a series of court decisions, a constitutional basis for challenging alleged discriminatory punishment has evolved. In that evolution, the issue of substance has turned out...

Ann Dryden Witte [1980] has recently argued in this Journal that new support is found for the deterrent hypothesis (or the "economic model of crime") when individual data are employed to estimate the determinants of rearrest rates. Witte estimates a conventional economic model of crime using a...

Deeply rooted historical patterns allow us to make a corre­lation between imprisonment and unemployment and the mar­ginalization of blacks. This paper examines the interrelationships among criminal activity, punishment, and cycles of the economic system based on the influence of political and...

Economists understand racial discrimination to mean differential treatment of identically situated individuals of different races. While this conceptualization permits detection and measurement of racially disparate market and nonmarket outcomes (Myers, 1993), it leaves unanswered the questions...

Long before economics acquired the apt designation as the dismal science, it was known as political economy. Its muses, though, were not known as political economists. Instead, they often responded to titles like "moral philosopher" and "professor of theology and jurisprudence." For example, you...