The Criminalization of Hate: A Comparison of Structural and Polity Influences on the Passage of “Bias-Crime” Legislation in the United States

Abstract

Violence born of hatred, bias, or prejudice has become the source of highly politicized public debate and subsequent mandates that “somebody do something.” Accordingly, many federal, state, county, and city officials have taken measures to curb hate-motivated violence through new legislation. This criminalization of hate is a fairly recent development in legal and criminal history, and it is not surprising that little scholarly attention has so far been paid to understanding the adoption of hate crime legislation throughout the United States. We describe the content and distribution of “hate crime” laws, also known as “bias crime” laws. Then, we rely upon a complete inventory of hate crime statutes in the United States and social indicator data to investigate the social forces shaping the adoption of one particular type of hate crime legislation, so-called “bias-motivated violence and intimidation” statutes. Logistic regression analyses are used to determine how various structural and political variables compare and interact in terms of their impact on the criminalization process. Our findings suggest that structural and political determinants of criminalization posited by contemporary theoretical arguments are insufficient to explain the recent criminalization of hate.