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Zusatztext "Activists, pundits, and legislators who champion 'hate crime' laws will be hard-put to answer this stunning, caring book. Jacobs and Potter show how such laws may advance their sponsors' political status and moral self-importance yet diminish tolerance and justice. This definitive analysis will change the debate--and, let us hope, a sorry miscarriage of the law."--Jim Sleeper, author of Liberal Racism and The Closest of Strangers Informationen zum Autor James B. Jacobs, Director of New York University's Center for Research in Crime and Justice, is Professor of Law at the NYU School of Law. Kimberly Potter, formerly a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Research in Crime and Justice, is now in private law practice in Bronxville, NY. Klappentext In the early 1980s! a new category of crime appeared in the criminal law lexicon. In response to concerted advocacy-group lobbying! Congress and many state legislatures passed a wave of "hate crime" laws requiring the collection of statistics on! and enhancing the punishment for! crimesmotivated by certain prejudices. This book places the evolution of the hate crime concept in socio-legal perspective. James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter adopt a skeptical if not critical stance! maintaining that legal definitions of hate crime are riddled with ambiguity and subjectivity. No matterhow hate crime is defined! and despite an apparent media consensus to the contrary! the authors find no evidence to support the claim that the United States is experiencing a hate crime epidemic--instead! they cast doubt on whether the number of hate crimes is even increasing. The authors furtherassert that! while the federal effort to establish a reliable hate crime accounting system has failed! data collected for this purpose have led to widespread misinterpretation of the state of intergroup relations in this country. The book contends that hate crime as a socio-legal category represents the elaboration of an identity politics now manifesting itself in many areas of the law. But the attempt to apply the anti-discrimination paradigm to criminal law generates problems and anomalies. For one thing! members ofminority groups are frequently hate crime perpetrators. Moreover! the underlying conduct prohibited by hate crime law is already subject to criminal punishment. Jacobs and Potter question whether hate crimes are worse or more serious than similar crimes attributable to other anti-socialmotivations.They also argue that the effort to single out hate crime for greater punishment is! in effect! an effort to punish some offenders more seriously simply because of their beliefs! opinions! or values! thus implicating the First Amendment. Advancing a provoc Zusammenfassung An in-depth critique of the USA's dominant political and legal response to hate crime in the STUDIES IN CRIME AND PUBLIC POLICY series. The fallacious construction of hate crime epidemics by politicians and the media is considered, and it is argued that the laws created in response to such prejudicial views can be regarded as symbolic politics....
