THE CRIMINALIZATION OF HATE - A COMPARISON OF STRUCTURAL AND POLITY INFLUENCES ON THE PASSAGE OF BIAS-CRIME LEGISLATION IN THE UNITED-STATES

Violence born of hatred bins, or prejudice has become the source of hi ghly politicized public debate and subsequent mandates that ''somebody do something. ''Accordingly, many federal, state, county, and city of ficials have taken measures to curb hate-motivated violence through ne w legislation. This criminalization of hate is a fairly recent develop ment in legal and criminal history, and it is not surprising that litt le scholarly attention has so far been paid to understanding the adopt ion of hate crime legislation throughout the United States. We describ e the content and distribution of ''hate crime'' laws, also known as ' 'bias crime'' laws. Then, we rely upon a complete inventory of hate cr ime statutes in the United States and social indicator data to investi gate the social forces shaping the adoption of one particular type of hate crime legislation, so-called ''bias-motivated violence and intimi dation'' statutes. Logistic regression analyses me used to determine h are various structural and political variables compare and interact in terms of their impact on the criminalization process. Our findings su ggest that structural and political determinants of criminalization po sited by contemporary theoretical arguments are insufficient to explai n the recent criminalization of hate.