Hate Crimes
Criminal Law & Identity Politics
by James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter, 1998 Laws making crimes motivated by racial or other prejudice began to be legislated in the 1980s, and gained momentum in the 1990s. These laws were lobbied for by the interest groups who felt victimized: minority groups, women's groups, gay groups, and disabilities groups. Nobody opposed most of them: a win-win situation for the legislators involved. But hate crime laws did not work the way that lobbyists had intended: data gathering did not show large numbers of hate crimes, and inter-group crimes were often committed by the minorities feeling victimized. Because the laws' purposes included among them acknowledgement of the status of varius groups, strife grew between minority groups seeking inclusion in the legislation. From a civil rights point of view, the hate crime laws started on shaky ground. After all, hate crime laws add to the criminal sentences of those with politically incorrect opinions. Courts have nonetheless upheld hate crime legislation.
This book makes a lot of good points, but in an inelegant fashion. The authors' overcritical style is overkill. The points that they cede are ceded reluctantly. And while the authors' assertion that hate crime is not on the rise may be correct, the claim that hate crime is not rampant is absurd. As the authors point out elsewhere in their book, most violent crime includes an element of hate. For that reason, I believe that the hate crime statistics are underestimates, not overestimates. Some of what the authors have to say is outdated; the supreme court no longer upholds sodomy laws, for instance.
Politically charged reading.
