Aggravated harms in hate crimes don’t justify a separate punishment category.

Evidence

There has been a great deal of speculation about what the harms might be but relatively little empirical investigation. And, not all of the alleged harms provide a justification for the additional punishment of a class of crimes. For instance, it has been observed that hate crimes are more likely to involve ‘excessive violence’ (B. Levin, 1999, p. 15); cause injury; lead to hospitalization; and involve multiple offenders, serial attacks, and repeat victimization of the same targets than criminal assaults in general (B. Levin, 1999, p. 15; J. Levin & McDevitt, 1993). Although these harms would obviously merit more severe penalties in the specific cases to which they apply, none of them arguably provides a justification for the creation of a category of punishment above and beyond the circumstances of the particular crime. — Irene Zempi and Imran Awan, Islamophobia, 49

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s own framing chapter on defining Islamophobia and its victimisation debates — the same ‘speculation outpacing evidence’ problem recurs wherever hate-crime harms are asserted.
• QUESTION: Which alleged harms of hate crime would actually justify a distinct offence category, if any — the paragraph gestures at the question but never answers it.