Racist Offenders and the Politics of ‘Hate Crime’

In the UK and USA ‘Hate crime’ has become a topic of public controversy and social mobilization around issues of violence and harassment. This has largely but not exclusively addressed racism, homophobia and gender based violence. This article has three objectives. First, to situate hate crime legislation within a broad theory of modernity;secondly to examine the politics of its emergence as a public issue; thirdly to use data from the authors' recent research in Greater Manchester to illuminate the complexity of the concept of ‘hate crime’. The centrality of ‘hate crime’ to current debates derives from the importance of rights-based regulation of complex societies and the juridical management of emotional life. Hatred and violence have become problematic behaviour thrown into relief by a long term civilizing process. Hate crimes have thus acquired powerful rhetorical focus for mobilization of victim and identity politics. With reference to racist violence in Oldham and elsewhere in Greater Manchester, we argue that in its application and construction, however, ‘hate crime’ is a complex phenomenon that might dramatize rather than regulate the problems it seeks to address. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Hate Crime Canon and Beyond: A Critical Assessment

Although it remains an empirical question whether the U.S. is experiencing greater levels of hate-motivated-conduct than in the past, it is beyond dispute that the concept of ‘hate crime’ has been institutionalized in social, political, and legal discourse in the U.S. From the introduction and politicization of the term hate crime in the late 1970s to the continued enforcement of hate crime law at the beginning of the twenty-first century, social movements have constructed the problem of bias-motivated violence in particular ways, while politicians at both the federal and state level have made legislation that defines the parameters of hate crime. Accordingly, this article identifies and examines the parameters of a hate crime canon in the U.S., which can first and foremost be described as a body of law that 1) provides anew state policy action, by either creating anew criminal category, altering an existing law, or enhancing penalties for select extant crimes when they are committed for bias reasons; 2) contains an intent standard, which refers to the subjective intention of the perpetrator rather than relying solely on the basis of objective behavior; and 3) specifies a list of protected social statuses, such as race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, disabilities, etc. Arguing that these features constitute the core parameters of the hate crime canon and attendant discourse in the U.S., this article offers a critical assessment of the emergence, institutionalization, and arguable consequences of ‘hate crime’ as a recently developed social fact - in the Durkheimian sense of the word - that is consequential for the politics of victimization in the modern era and the social control of violence against minorities more particularly. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Organisation of Hate

In this paper, it is argued that we need to understand the role of ‘hate’ in the organisation of bodies and spaces before we ask the question of the limits of ‘hate crime’ as a legal category. Rather than assuming hate is a psychological disposition - that it comes from within a psyche and then moves out to others - the paper suggests that hate works to align individual and collective bodies through the very intensity of its attachments. Such alignments are unstable precisely given the fact that hate does not reside in a subject, object or body; the instability of hate is what makes it so powerful in generating the effects that it does. Furthermore, although hate does not reside positively in a subject, body or sign, this does not mean that hate does have effects that are structural and mediated. This paper shows that hate becomes attached or ‘stuck’ to particular bodies, often through violence, force and harm. The paper dramatizes its arguments by a reflection on racism as hate crime, looking at the circulation of figures of hate in discourses of nationhood, from both extreme right wing and mainstream political parties. It also considers the part of what hate is doing can precisely be understood in terms of the affect it has on the bodies of those designated as the hated, an affective life that is crucial to the injustice of hate crime. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Affairs of the Heart: Hate Crime and the Politics of Crime Control

Various scholars have noted the priority given to law in the politics of hate violence; violence is the problem and law, more specifically the criminal law, the solution at the ‘heart’ of society. This article seeks to explore some of the gaps and silences in the existing literature and politics that mobilize these ideas and associations. It is the gap sand silences associated with demands for and expectations of criminal justice that will be the particular concern of this article. The demand for law is examined by way of David Garland's recent work on the culture of crime control. His work offers an analysis of the contemporary place of crime control in Anglo-American liberal democracies. A distinctive feature of his analysis is to be found in the way it maps an important paradox of contemporary crime control; its political centrality and an increasing recognition of its limitations. Garland's ‘criminology of the self’ and the ‘criminology of the other’ raise some important challenges for those who advocate resort to crime control. My particular concern is to consider the significance of Garland's work for a contemporary sexual politics that puts violence and criminal justice at the heart of that politics. Feminist, gay and lesbian scholarship first on criminal justice and second, on violence and law will be used to develop a critical dialogue with Garland's analysis and to reflect upon the challenges raised by his insights into contemporary crime control. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Aboriginal organized crime in Canada: Developing a typology for understanding and strategizing responses

The present study explores the theory and, to the greatest degree possible given the limitations of the data, the reality of aboriginal participation in what may be defined as ‘organized crime’ in Canada, engaging the possibility of a definition of ‘aboriginal organized crime’ and the proposal of a ‘typology’ of participants. In the development of both the definition and typology, the researchers build upon Beare's definition of organized crime to include the dimension of motivations—whether social, political or economic—which theorists agree are crucial in understanding organized crime activities, but which do not appear in current definitions of the term, as well as important contextual factors informing participation in aboriginal organized crime networks.     

Hate Crime and the Privatization of Political Responsibility: Protecting Queer Citizens in the United States?

My purpose in this article is to address issues that arise with the emergence of “hate crime” law as a response to violence against historically subordinated groups, with particular reference to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered (henceforth “GLBT”), and otherwise queer citizens. The specific jurisdictional context of my reflection is the USA but the issues I raise have significance beyond that context. Increasingly in recent years hate crime legislation has been adopted or proposed in the US as well as other jurisdictions as a response to bigotry and violence directed against minority groups in multi-cultural societies. In 2006 in the UK, proposals to outlaw “incitement to religious hatred” were hotly debated. In 2008 demands are being made to extend the ‘incitement laws’ to include incitement to homophobic hatred. In 2007 in the US the Senate and House of Representatives in Washington DC passed an Act, which some described as the Matthew Shepard Act, to promote and enhance the use of the criminal law against perpetrators of crimes motivated by hatred based on perceived sexual orientation and gender identity. Ultimately the Act failed to become law. The debates in the UK and US provide the backdrop against which I want to examine the arguments for and against hate crime legislation, both generally and with specific application to queer citizens. This require us to think again about the relation of queer citizens to the state, the reach of political equality and human rights, and the aims and limits of the criminal law and system of “criminal justice”.

Deadly Words: State Power and the Entanglement of Speech and Violence in Hate Crime

Any analysis of hate crime that attempts to separate speech from action, language from violence, faces epistemological difficulties that limit the range of conversations about laws responding to identity-based injury in the United States. Active debates have raged over the implications of bias crime sentence enhancement laws for the protection of ‘freespeech’, thus addressing the inextricability of language and meaning from hate crime. Those in favor of legal responses to identity-based injury tend toward essentialist claims which assume the stability of identity and of meanings inherent in words or actions. Those opposed assert the impossibility of codifying the meaning of words or actions in the law, and/or they worry about the reification of (victimized) identities accompanying bias crime statutes. This article argues that the focus on language and speech in these debates simultaneously enables an evasion of discussion about the law's response to bias-related violence, and misleadingly assumes too much stability in the functions of law and the nature of state power. Interviews conducted by the author with individuals involved in a 1992 racist hate crime are used to show the diverse elements of state power suffusing the incident and its aftermath. An analysis of the crime's investigation and prosecution under a Maryland hate crime statute suggests that law enforcement officers are primarily using hate crime laws as public relations tools in a fight against community perceptions that they are themselves bigots. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

What Lies Beneath: Exploring Links Between Asylum Policy and Hate Crime in the UK

This paper explores the link between increasing incidents of hate crime and the asylum policy of successive British governments with its central emphasis on deterrence. The constant problematisation of asylum seekers in the media and political discourse ensures that ‘anti-immigrant’ prejudice becomes mainstreamed as a common-sense response. The victims are not only the asylum seekers hoping for a better life but democratic society itself with its inherent values of pluralism and tolerance debased and destabilised.     

A General<Emphasis Type="Italic"> Theories</Emphasis> of Hate Crime? Strain,Doing Difference and Self Control

This article attempts to put forward a more holistic vision of hate crime causation by exploring the intersections which exist between three separate criminological theories. Within the extant literature both Robert Merton’s strain theory and Barbara Perry’s structured action theory of ‘doing difference’ have been widely used to explain why prejudice motivated crimes continue to pervade most communities. Together the theories help to illuminate the sociological factors which act to create immense fear of, and hatred towards, various minority identity groups. However, neither of these theories adequately explain why some individuals commit hate crimes while others, equally affected by socio-economic strains and social constructions of ‘difference’, do not. This article therefore moves beyond such macro explanations of hate crime by drawing upon Gottfredson and Hirschi’s A General Theory of Crime (1990). Using typology research carried out by various academics, the article attempts to illustrate how socio-economic strains and general fears of ‘difference’ become mutually reinforcing determinants, promulgating a culture of prejudice against certain ‘others', which in turn ultimately triggers the hate motivated behaviours of individuals with low self control.     

Why a Criminal Prohibition on Sex Selective Abortions Amounts to a Thought Crime

In a sex selective abortion, a woman aborts a fetus simply on account of the fetus’ sex. Her motivation or underlying reason for doing so may very well be sexist. She could be disposed to thinking that a female child is inferior to a male one. In a hate crime, an individual commits a crime on account of a victim’s sex, race, sexual orientation or the like. The individual may be sexist or racist in picking his victim. He or she could be disposed to thinking that one race or sex is inferior to another. I argue that while a prohibition on sex selective abortions is anomalous in a liberal, criminal legal framework, hate crime legislation may not be. The former but not the latter constitutes a thought crime. I define a thought crime as one where an agent’s motivation is not just relevant but sufficient to take an act from the domain of the non-punishable to the domain of the punishable. Ignoring a woman’s sexist motivation in procuring an abortion suddenly renders her act of abortion legal. On the other hand, discounting an agent’s bias in committing a hate motivated assault or murder does not transform the act from a punishable one to a non-punishable one. Assaulting or murdering is already a crime.     

The end of organised crime in the European Union

So much has been written—and vigorously contested—about ‘organised crime’ (OC) that the impending fall of this familiar icon may come as a shock, both to its detractors and to those who take it for granted. Yet that moment may be upon us, for reasons that this paper will explore, as the European Union shifts the vocabulary within which policies on police cooperation are articulated. A pivot of this change is the EU Council Decision on Europol, first debated by the Council in late 2006 and anticipated as applying from 2010 onwards. This will shift the scope of Europol’s work from ‘organised crime’ (attributing qualities to criminality) to ‘serious crime’ (concern with impacts and harms falling on individual and collective victims); will transfer financing of Europol to the Community budget; and so will initiate parliamentary scrutiny. These issues in security governance are explored from ‘northern’, ‘southern’ and ‘eastern’ European perspectives and in the contexts of ongoing enlargement and democratisation of the EU.

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Organized criminal involvement in the illicit antiquities trade

From the ”glocal” perspective of a large sample of archaeologists conducting fieldwork throughout the world and working on the very sites of interest to looters, this paper explores the question whether and to what extent organized crime is involved in the theft and illicit export of archaeological resources. Two major findings are presented: first, archaeologists tend almost unanimously to consider that organized crime operates within the ‘global’ antiquities market, but when asked about their own personal experiences with looting on the sites where they work, many fewer report observations of organized crime; second, however, it is apparent that respondents’ conceptions of “organized crime” involve media-driven, stereotypical representations of mafia-style structures. Therefore, although in their reporting of observed local activities they do not provide substantial survey evidence of the presence of organized crime so defined, they do report appreciable “organization” among those who have looted their sites—which, again, they have almost unanimously experienced. This paper considers the implications of such findings for both the definitional debate on organized crime and the academic analysis of the trade in looted antiquities.     

Left Realism,community and state-building

Left Realism, as it emerged in the mid 1980s in the UK was a policy-oriented intervention focusing on the reality of crime for the working class victim and the need to elaborate a socialist alternative to conservative emphases on ‘law and order’. It saw the renewal of high crime, deprived communities as involving democratic police accountability to those communities. During the subsequent period developments have moved very much against the orientations of Left Realism. This paper compares two different contexts of renewal—the deprived urban community in the UK and the war-torn ‘failed state’ in Bosnia—and identifies certain common policy orientations which are then criticised from a Left Realist perspective.     

Spouse Abuse and Child Abuse by Army Soldiers

This study analyzed data collected by the U.S. Army’s Family Advocacy Program, the group primarily responsible for family violence prevention, identification, evaluation, treatment, and follow-up on Army installations. Patterns of spouse abuse and child abuse perpetrated within a five year period (2000–2004) were examined in a sample of 10,864 Army Soldiers who were substantiated for family violence offenses. Three groups of family violence offenders were compared: (1) those who perpetrated spouse offenses only; (2) those who perpetrated child offenses only; and (3) those who perpetrated both spouse and child offenses. Results showed that the majority of substantiated family violence offenders were spouse offenders who had not committed child abuse (61%), followed by child offenders who had not committed spouse abuse (27%), and finally those who committed both spouse and child offenses (12%). The three groups of family violence offenders differed in terms of the types of abuse they perpetrated (neglect of children, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse), their experiences of being a spouse abuse victim, and sociodemographic characteristics. Twelve percent of all spouse abusers committed multiple spouse abuse incidents, and 10% of all child abusers committed multiple child abuse incidents.     

The crime control industry and the management of the surplus population

This essay examines what we are calling the ‘crime control industry’ and how the growth of such an industry relates to growing inequality and the need to ‘manage’ or ‘contain’ the ‘surplus population.’ Profits are a major moving force in this process, rather than the goal of reducing crime and suffering. An important component of this industry is the ‘prison industrial complex,’ one of the fastest growing industries in the U.S. Also included is a rapidly growing private security industry that includes private police and security guards, along with a growing supply of technology to aid in the ‘war on crime.’ Other components include drug testing companies, gated communities, and a booming gun industry. We conclude by outlining possible explanations for the growth of this industry.     

Stereotypical Hate Crimes and Criminal Justice Processing: A Multi-Dataset Comparison of Bias Crime Arrest Patterns by Offender and Victim Race

Many hate crimes are not reported and even fewer hate crimes result in an arrest. This study investigates patterns of victim reporting and arrest for hate crimes in two parts. First, using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, we find that, controlling for offense severity, hate crimes are less likely than non-bias crimes to be reported to the police and that the police are less likely to take further action for hate crimes, compared to non-hate crimes. Second, we use data from the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission and the National Incident-Based Reporting System to compare differences between types of hate crimes in the likelihood of crime clearance. We find that those hate crimes most likely to result in arrest are those that fit the profile of a “stereotypical” hate crime: violent incidents, incidents committed by hate groups, and incidents involving white offenders and black victims.     

War,crime, empire and cosmopolitanism

The millions of deaths produced by states and governments make the 20th century ‘unnameable’, a century far more lethal than all previous ‘pre-civil’ epochs. It does not appear that contemporary state violence tends to decline or to temper the brutality commonly attributed to archaic armies, nor that the rules and limitations internationally imposed on that violence, throughout the last decades, have reduced its effects. The 20th century having gone, and while hope was growing that mass murder and destruction would also go with it, recent events appear to suggest that the twenty-first century is poised to become unnameable in its turn. In this paper a reflection is presented of the notion of war as annihilation, which emerges in contemporary international conflicts. This is followed by a review of the debate on the relationship between war, empire and crime. As a logical extension of the argument developed, war is described as a particularly devastating form of crime of the powerful. Finally, reflecting on the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’, the discussion suggests that such a concept may offer legitimacy to those who invest their enthusiasm in supporting contemporary wars as well as to those who fight against them. The latter may find inspiration in the idea of a ‘critical’ cosmopolitanism.     

‘Are the ‘others’ coming?’: Evidence on ‘alien conspiracy’ from three illegal markets in Greece

In the early 1990s Greece accepted a large number of immigrants from a variety of contexts. Since then ‘organised criminality’ has become an important aspect of the immigration nexus in the country, and ethnicity has been viewed as an extremely important-if not the primary–explanatory variable. Simultaneously, there has been very little empirical research on ‘organised crime’ in Greece in general and ‘organised crime’ and ethnicity in particular. The purpose of this article, which is based on previous research that the author has conducted on three illegal markets in Greece (a. migrant smuggling business, b. the cigarette black market, and c. the market of stolen cars and car parts), is to show the extent to which these illegal markets are controlled by foreign nationals, and establish whether there is such thing as an ‘alien conspiracy’ in the particular country.     

Domestic Violence and Female Genital Mutilation in Kenya: Effects of Ethnicity and Education

This paper investigates domestic violence against women, including definitions of ‘domestic violence;’ and investigates “Female Genital Mutilation.” Data for this paper are from three national household surveys in Kenya: ‘Demographic & Health Survey’ (2003), Afrobarometer (2003), and ‘Work, Attitudes, & Spending’ (2004). Previous research in many countries has found convincing evidence of a tendency for domestic violence to be less common in households where the respondent and/or spouse have more education. This paper adds a new factor: the respondent’s mother’s education also seems relevant to prevalence of GBV (perhaps because of childhood socialization). This pattern applies to both experience of violence, and attitudes to such violence. There also appears to be a strong link between ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ (female circumcision) and mother’s education level. In each case, more education is associated with less violence.     

Restoring the Victim: Emotional Reactions, Justice Beliefs, and Support for Reparation and Punishment

Psychological responses to criminal wrongdoing have primarily focused on the offender, particularly on how (and why) offender punishment satisfies people’s need for justice. However, the restoration of the victim presents another way in which the “psychological itch” that injustice creates can be addressed. In the present article, I discuss two lay theories of how crime victims can be restored: a belief that the harm caused to crime victims should be directly repaired (a restorative justice approach) versus a belief that victim harm should be addressed via the punishment of the offender (a retributive justice approach). These two lay theories are discussed with regard to their emotional and ideological determinants, as well as situational and chronic factors that can affect whether people adopt a reparative or punitive “justice mindset” in dealing with victim concerns (and crime in general).