The criminal careers of those imprisoned for hate crime in the UK
| Author | David P. Farrington,Darrick Jolliffe |
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370819839598 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370819839598
European Journal of Criminology
2020, Vol. 17(6) 936 –955
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370819839598
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The criminal careers of
those imprisoned for
hate crime in the UK
Darrick Jolliffe
University of Greenwich, UK
David P. Farrington
Cambridge University, UK
Abstract
Hate crime research has increased, but there are very few studies examining hate crime offenders.
It is, therefore, difficult to determine to what extent those who perpetrate this offence might be
different from those who have not committed hate crime. This study is the first to provide an
account of the demographics and criminal histories of those serving time in prison for committing
a hate crime. It is based on a large complete population of offenders in the UK. Hate crime
offenders released from prison were found to have prolific criminal careers, having committed
a wide range and large number of different types of offences. When compared with those who
committed a general (non-hate) violent offence, violent hate crime offenders were significantly
older and were considerably more prolific in their previous offending. Violent hate crime appeared
quantitatively, as opposed to qualitatively, different from violent non-hate crime, but this was less
clearly true when those who had committed public order hate crime were compared with other
public order offenders. Interventions to reduce the later offending of violent hate crime offenders
should be based on the effective interventions that exist for violent offenders, but should take
into account knowledge about the surprisingly prolific criminal careers of hate crime offenders.
Keywords
criminal careers, hate crime, prison, violence
Introduction
Although the perpetration of hate crime is potentially as old as history, research demon-
strating the pervasiveness of this pernicious form of criminal offending appears to have
Corresponding author:
Darrick Jolliffe, School of Law and Criminology, University of Greenwich, London, SE10 9LS, UK.
Email: d.jolliffe@gre.ac.uk
839598EUC0010.1177/1477370819839598European Journal of CriminologyJolliffe and Farrington
research-article2019
Article
Jolliffe and Farrington 937
begun in the US in the late 1980s. Finn and McNeil (1987) conducted an exploratory
review of the criminal justice responses to bias crimes,1 funded by the National Institute
of Justice, and this was followed by the influential work of Herek (1989), who studied
the prevalence of hate crime victimization against lesbian and gay men in the US. In both
research contributions the prevalence of hate crime was much higher than anticipated.
In the UK, academic research on hate crime commenced somewhat later, with rela-
tively limited contributions before 2000. This was despite the fact that there were very
high-profile hate crime offences perpetrated in the 1990s in England, including the racist
murder of the Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, and the racist and homophobic nail
bomb campaign in London by David Copland in 1999. It is noteworthy that the subse-
quent police investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence was itself so discrimina-
tory that a later review of the police response to this horrible offence resulted in the
Metropolitan Police being labelled ‘institutionally racist’ (Macpherson, 1999).
Although the most appropriate definition of hate crime is still the subject of much
academic debate, in England and Wales the criminal justice system does have an agreed
working definition. This is: ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or
any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice’ (College of Policing, 2014).
Of the nine official protected characteristics that were introduced by the Equality Act
2010,2 there are five that form the official ‘strands’ of hate crime and are recorded by the
police. These are offences against people based on their ethnicity, religion, disability,
sexual orientation or transgender status. Therefore, in England and Wales it is illegal to
discriminate based on age, but an offence directed at someone because of their age would
not be officially recorded as a hate crime.
There is no single piece of ‘hate crime’ legislation in England and Wales, but the
Crime and Disorder Act 1998 introduced racially and religiously aggravated offences,
including those for assault, criminal damage, harassment, stalking and public order
offences. In addition, as part of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, new sentencing provisions
were introduced for those convicted of hate-related offences. These allowed for enhanced
penalties, such as longer prison sentences, for those found guilty with evidence of hostil-
ity towards the victim based on the victim’s (presumed) ethnicity, religion, disability or
sexual orientation or if the victim was (presumed) transgender.
There has been an exponential increase in the amount of research produced about hate
crime, but this has tended to focus on fairly restricted areas. One aspect that has garnered
considerable research is the amount of ‘hidden’ hate crime, or the hate crime that does
not come to the attention of police (for example, Crime Survey of England and Wales,
2015; James, 2015). For example, in England and Wales in 2014/15 there were 52,528
hate crime offences reported to police, but the nationally representative Crime Survey of
England and Wales estimates the number of hate crimes to be in the range of 222,000
(Crime Survey of England and Wales, 2015).3
Other areas of hate crime that have attracted considerable research include how best
to define hate crime (for example, Hall, 2013), which groups should be considered as
victims of hate crime (for example, Garland, 2010; James, 2015), the profound impact of
hate crime on victims and communities (for example, Perry, 2001), and the criminal
justice responses to hate crime and how these could, and should, be improved to avoid
secondary victimization (Chakraborti et al., 2014). There has also been interest in how
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