The recent surge in hate crimes alongside persistent concerns over policing and prisons has catalyzed new interest in hate crime prevention outside the criminal legal system. While policymakers, civil rights groups, and people in targeted communities internally disagree on the value of hate crime laws and law enforcement responses to hate crimes, they often converge in advocating measures that could prevent hate crimes from occurring in the first place. Those measures potentially include educational initiatives, conflict resolution programs, political reforms, social services, or other proactive efforts aimed at the root causes of hate crimes. Focusing on the public conversation around anti-Asian hate crimes, this Essay argues that very different conceptions of the hate crime problem lie beneath the support for hate crime prevention. Broadly speaking, proposals for hate crime prevention fall into three categories: 1) prejudice reduction measures; 2) political and structural reforms; and 3) socioeconomic investments in communities. Prejudice reduction measures, such as educational programs to reduce stereotyping, stem from a view of hate crimes as an extreme manifestation of bias. Advocacy for political and structural reforms corresponds to a conception of hate crimes as the product of intergroup struggles over power and resources often influenced by the state. Calls for socioeconomic investments link hate crimes to the conditions that produce interpersonal harm more generally, such as economic distress or public health failures. This Essay maps out these different conceptions of hate crime prevention and relates them to theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence from social psychology, sociology, criminology, and other fields. Drawing on this review, it argues that the project of hate crime prevention faces several empirical and normative conundrums. In addition to disagreements over conceptualizing hate crimes, these puzzles include the relationship between attitudes and behavior, the potential tension between hate crime prevention and other socially desirable policy goals, and the difficulty of maintaining support for long-term, structural change.

最近仇恨犯罪的激增以及对治安和监狱的持续担忧促使人们对刑事法律体系之外的仇恨犯罪预防产生了新的兴趣。虽然政策制定者、民权团体和目标社区的人们在内部对仇恨犯罪法的价值和执法部门对仇恨犯罪的反应持不同意见，但他们往往会聚集在一起，倡导可以首先防止仇恨犯罪发生的措施。这些措施可能包括教育举措、冲突解决计划、政治改革、社会服务或其他旨在消除仇恨犯罪根源的积极努力。这篇文章着眼于围绕反亚裔仇恨犯罪的公众对话，认为对仇恨犯罪问题的不同概念隐藏在对仇恨犯罪预防的支持之下。从广义上讲，预防仇恨犯罪的建议分为三类：1）减少偏见的措施；2) 政治和结构改革；3) 对社区的社会经济投资。减少偏见的措施，例如减少刻板印象的教育计划，源于将仇恨犯罪视为偏见的极端表现的观点。政治和结构改革的倡导与仇恨犯罪的概念相对应，仇恨犯罪是群体间争夺权力和资源的产物，通常受国家影响。呼吁社会经济投资将仇恨犯罪与更普遍地造成人际伤害的情况联系起来，例如经济困难或公共卫生失败。这篇文章列出了预防仇恨犯罪的这些不同概念，并将它们与社会心理学、社会学、犯罪学和其他领域的理论观点和经验证据联系起来。根据这篇评论，它认为预防仇恨犯罪的项目面临着几个经验和规范难题。除了对仇恨犯罪概念化的分歧之外，这些困惑还包括态度与行为之间的关系、仇恨犯罪预防与其他社会期望的政策目标之间的潜在紧张关系，以及维持对长期结构性变革的支持的困难。