Hate Crimes: Perspectives on Offending and the Law

Abstract

Crime and violence motivated by hatred and bigotry, what we now refer to as hate or bias crime, is a centuries-old problem. However, a coherent body of law that explicitly punishes this conduct only emerged in the late 20th century. The first hate crime laws were enacted in the early 1980s, and today these laws appear in the criminal codes of 45 states and in federal law. The specific features of hate crime laws differ from state to state, but there is no doubt that hate crime has been firmly institutionalized in American jurisprudence, and it represents a type of behavior that governments seek to curtail and scholars try to understand and predict.