what is the purpose of legally defining "hate crimes"?

[jrtom]

This question keeps occurring to me in different contexts. This morning, I learned that some unspecified treatment of homeless people apparently constitutes a "hate crime" in Washington State: http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kplu/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1201540

This is one of those contexts in which I'd kind of like to believe that I'm missing something, so this is a genuine question to which I'd like to receive thoughtful responses.

Wikipedia states:

Hate crimes differ from conventional crime because they are not directed simply at an individual, but are meant to cause fear and intimidation in an entire group or class of people.

(The definition above sounds like it could easily have been for "terrorism", but I'll leave that alone.)

I can understand members of various minority and/or powerless groups wanting to ensure that they're not systematically oppressed, and I certainly understand that individual crimes can have very wide repercussions.

But it seems to me nevertheless that legal recognition of crimes qua hate crimes has some serious pitfalls, too.

• Prosecuting someone as a "hate criminal" (so to speak) identifies their cause and perhaps even legitimizes it. It gives their action more publicity than it would otherwise have had. Possibly even gives the actor the status of martyr.
  
• Shouldn't we prefer to focus on preventing crimes of violence and intimidation in the first place? Establishing motive is useful...but it's not clear why it should be a basis for punishment, rather than the nature of the actions themselves.
  
• Perhaps most importantly, it comes at least perilously close to legislating opinions, or at least motivations. If we protect free speech, certainly we must also afford at least that level of protection to opinion.
  

Knowing me, I'm probably missing something practical and obvious. Any thoughts?

Comments

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Interesting point. Thanks.

Again, though, I feel that I have to ask why certain motivations should have special status. If we have reason to believe that X believes that people with characteristic Y are horrible, does it matter what Y is?

Even more fundamentally: if we believe that X is a likely recidivist, is that fact alone enough for us to change our minds about what punishment is appropriate, or do X's motivations have to fit into a specific legal definition?


Turning this around for a moment, we can always come up with new motivations for hating each other. One can easily imagine, say, kids deciding to beat up their peers that have cybernetic implants. (Certainly the practice of beating kids with glasses up was alive and well when I was a child, as I can personally testify.) It seems to me that hate crime definitions are likely to always be behind the times in terms of the kinds of discrimination that they are intended to address...which suggests that maybe they're too specific in nature, at the least.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I would like to see a definition of "hate crime" that does not require specification of what category the victim falls into. It shouldn't matter if X beats up Y because Y falls into category A, B, or C; as long as X is beating up Y for falling into *any* category I feel it's a hate crime. Specifying a set of categories, you're right, isn't going to work for various reasons.

Another thing that your comments bring up to me is what is the purpose of serving time or paying a fine - is it a correctional system, or a justice system? If it's a correctional system (as I prefer it to be), then both motivations and chance of *future* recidivism are important in what sort of treatment the criminal should be prescribed. If we see it as a justice system, then I think *past* recidivism is more important, and though motivations still play a role in the punishment prescribed for the crime, it would be a different role. (And of course both of those models for the system entirely avoid issues of the role of society in creating criminals.)

check check

[amnesiadust.livejournal.com]

I feel that I have to ask why certain motivations should have special status. If we have reason to believe that X believes that people with characteristic Y are horrible, does it matter what Y is?

Personally, I don't feel they should. The ultimate reason we should be horrified at such crimes is their violence. We might be appalled that certain beliefs greatly lower the threshold for violence, and that should cause us to consider those beliefs as dangerous to society in some way, whether or not they are demonstrably wrong. But imprisoning people who hold those ideas, simply for holding them, doesn't seem like an acceptable way of dealing with those ideas, or at least not one consistent with an Enlightenment value system. Ideas should be engaged in discourse, whereas violent actions should be punished. So this reminds me of zandperl's comment that

yes, approaching thought crimes, is just that we wish to somehow reduce the amount of prejudice in the world. I don't think there's any good way to legislate this unfortunately, so coming up with hate crimes is the least bad way, perhaps.

I'm not convinced that it is the least bad way, since what is required is not legislation, but a sea change in the values of our society. Legislation can forcibly protect the rights of endangered minorities, but value systems must necessarily change from the grass roots.