In the past decade, a lot of advocacy from the mainstream anti-violence movement has focused heavily on passing hate crime legislation. Such legislation introduces stricter penalties for those convicted of assaulting marginalized people. This type of legislation feels good for obvious reasons, but it actually is quite problematic.
It isn’t uncontroversial to claim that the United States has a problem with mass incarceration. The United States has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners despite being only 5 percent of the population. The hammer of mass incarceration has always come down the hardest on marginalized people. Black and brown people have always been specifically targeted by this system.
One in three black men will go to prison in their lifetimes. Although white and black people do drugs at a similar rate, black people are much more likely to be arrested and convicted for it. John Ehrlichman, Nixon's top aide and one of the chief architects of mass incarceration, even admitted, in 1994, that mass incarceration was created to lock up black people.
The criminal justice system has also intensely punished poor people. As court fees rise, poor people are increasingly unable to pay the cost. This leads to a situation where poor people become saddled with debt from court fees, which then causes them to become caught in an endless cycle of criminalization. There is also the issue of laws that criminalize homelessness, such as bans on sleeping and begging for food in public, that have been put in place in many major metropolitan areas. The purpose of these laws is not to fix homelessness, but to hide it from the public view.
LGBTQ+ people, most notably those of color, are no exceptions to this pattern. All across the country, queer people are profiled by police, brutalized in prison and even have basic aspects of their identity criminalized. The problem with hate crime laws is that they support this system, both physically and ideologically.
Firstly, hate crime laws support mass incarceration by sending more people to prison for longer periods of time. Not only that, but they help further criminalize already marginalized groups as the majority of those convicted of hate crimes are low-income people of color.
Secondly, hate crime legislation sends a message that stricter incarceration is a good thing. The main justification of mass incarceration has always been that locking people up would help solve social problems, especially problems related to violence. When we choose to pass hate crime legislation, we concede that central argument and thus, help the system persevere.
Hate crime legislation also helps excuse state violence. Agents of the state who commit violent acts, like police officers who kill black men, are never charged with hate crimes. This has the effect of upholding an ideological formation where agents of the state are somehow immune from hatred and bigotry. This is, of course, intensely problematic, as agents of the state are often the ones who hurt marginalized people the most.
Finally, hate crime laws don't really do anything as there is no empirical evidence that they deter violence against marginalized people.
Ultimately, hate crime laws feel good, but they only exacerbate the problem we want to solve. In doing anti-violence work in the future, we need to focus on survivors themselves, instead of trying to lock their assaulters up for longer periods of time.
