What are your thoughts on the matter?

Hmm..I had never heard that. Do people really do violent acts against the homeless? If so, then certainly they should be protected under the hate crime legislation; I would have thought that disabled people would qualify before the homeless, but either way. To bad we aren't passing some legislation to help them not be homeless?

Hate crime legislation is important because it protects those who are specifically persecuted for prejudices held against them.

How?

Yeah, they do.

The point that I found interesting about this was that it was introduced to try to undermine the idea of hate crimes, more than to protect homeless people.

Yeah that is strange, but not unusual in political history. For example, a bigoted senator added "Women" to one of the civil rights acts, in the hope that it would detract votes for the bill...Unfortunately, it didn't work, it actually drove the bill through. Its an example of what is termed "accidental justice." Not that I'm equating the persecution of women with that of the homeless, but violence is violence, and hate is hate. To cause harm to someone for any reason is wrong, but to do it someone because they are a minority is more wrong because it effects not just that person but furthers the persecution of entire group of people.

Remember that a hate crime is not a special crime, it is an added charge to a violent act, such as Murder or assault. Thus someone who commits hateful-violent acts is charged with one charge for the act-in-itself and then gets an added hate crime charge, which increases the severity of the sentence.

The is based on a rational self-interested view, that if one may be will to accept the consequences of committing violent acts, they will be less likely to do hate crimes toward socially persecuted groups if the consequences will be more severe.

Question:

Does the death penalty in the states that allow it decrease the number of crimes that warrent the use of it?

No

Actually there is no real way to test that question, because its not like you could have a control group, or compare dependent and independent variables. All you can survey is the number of violent crime in states with the death penalty v states that don't. But that isn't a truly accurate measurement.

However, all I'm saying is that it is based on a rationally self-interested view of human nature. Whether or not thats true, I have no idea. However I still believe that hate crime laws are justified on the basis that to commit violent acts against a minority on the basis that they are a minority(on the basis of hate) is to not only oppress that one person, but to persecute the whole group. How do you think the black community felt about lynchings? Or the gay community feels about Matthew Sheppard or Brandon Tina?


Hate crime laws are one way that the government can actively discourage violence towards persecuted groups, if it is by only saying that it is both morally and socially wrong.

My thoughts exactly. if they weren't already living a life of misery on the streets then they wouldn't be being attacked.

If we don't know if it will work then why use it? Because it might stop some people from hateful acts? We don't know if there's a link between violent video games and violence but if it might help stop some violence should we legislate it?

I just don't like it when the government makes laws that they can't show will make any sort of improvement whatsoever.

If the laws were focus more on rehabilitation than punishmen then I can see this being somewhat usefull, but as it stands I think it's an exercise in futility.


Don't you think the laws would lead to a false sense of security too?

Actually, if you give me a couple of days I can find the research that backs up my point, did it for a paper a few semesters ago.

I would like to read it, sounds interesting...

I want to stress my second point about the justification for hate crimes laws, because I think my original thinking screwed up the bigger picture. But first I will further clarify my reason from earlier. Many people believe that we do in fact operate on self-interests, and the law does factor into our decision making. Most people do not commit crimes because of fear of the law. This idea goes back all the way to Aristotle, and does have significant evidence in psychology.

Now is there a way to actually test to effective rate of laws which combat specific types of crime? I don't think so, because there is not way to test how people would act in the absence of laws altogether. Therefore we have to operate on a theory of the state of nature.


My second argument really is what makes hate crime laws actually important. When I say that to oppress a minority is more wrong then just an individual, I am making a Utilitarian argument (The greatest pleasure/happiness of the greatest number). I think this is a more sound justification for hate crime laws.

I would hope most people do not commit crimes because it's the right thing to do.

Even if the laws don't have an impact on hate crimes?

I don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand, homeless people have historically been attacked and taken advantage of by all sorts of people because of their status, but on the other hand I never really thought of hate crimes pertaining to class. The more that I think about it, however, I think this is a fair idea, even if its creators intent is to water down hate crime laws. We have or should have laws protecting historically oppressed racial, sexual and religious "minorities" (don't really like that term, sort of a "tyranny of numbers" as one of my professors has put it). So, why not laws protecting historically oppressed classes? All these forms of oppression intersect anyways- gender, race, class.

Concerning the idea of hate crime laws, I'm not a fan of laws. I'm in particular not a fan of prison, and the prison-industrial complex. But, at the same time we don't yet have adequate ways of addressing issues of power, and resulting injustices, in our society. In any society, that needs to be addressed. So, while in general I think laws are used as the state's tool to further oppress and keep under surveillance certain groups, such as blacks, hate crime laws could be one way of changing the legal discourse to recognize various forms of oppression and their history. There've also been numerous studies that also detail how things such as hate speech have real physical effects on people, such as increased risk of heart disease and so on. What qualifies as hate speech? Offensive speech specifically targeted against a historically oppressed group in our society.

Now, on the other hand, poor whites would most probably be the target of hate crime laws (concerning race), and it's my opinion that while blatant hate speech and hate crimes can be very damaging to a person's psyche and body, putting poor whites in jail doesn't change the wider power structure. It in fact may reinforce it, and allow "genteel racism" to slip by. This is possibly much more damaging as laws, education and so on are determined by what are essentially racist assumptions under the guise of "color-blind equality" rhetoric. Race exists, it has existed as a powerful discourse for the past several hundreds of years, let's acknowledge it. I'm torn though between my principle against laws and prison, the possibility of jailing almost only poor whites who may in fact be engaging in (bizarrely enough) counter-hegemonic actions through hate crimes, and the reality that we people of color and other oppressed groups sometimes have to take what we can get.