Hate and Bias Crime: Criminologically Congruent Law? A Review of Barbara Perry’s Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader

The last decade of the 20th century has seen a flurry of hate crime legislation and other state activities, none of which have had an appreciable effect on the frequency or certainly the severity of hate crime. Such initiatives are insufficient responses to bias-motivated violence, in that they do not touch the underlying structures that support hate crime. Abdicating responsibility for countering such violence to the state, then, will not be a sufficiently effective long-term strategy. Rather, the respon-sibility must be shared and distributed across institutional and interactional levels. Moreover, the ultimate goal is not only to attack hate crime, but to disrupt the insti-tutional and cultural assumptions about difference that condition hate crime. To the extent that difference is socially constructed, it can also be reconstructed (Perry, 2003, p. 387) Hate crime ” — like “what works”, “zero tolerance ” and “three strikes ” — israpidly becoming another of those criminological buzz-words that travels around the western world leaving a trail of advocates usurping it into their own policy agendas (Newburn, 2002). In the United States (US), hate crime legislation identifies offences motivated by animosity towards particular groups of people a