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

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.