Rough Draft: In today’s society hate crimes are defined as a crime of which is motivated by a hatred or prejudice towards a race, color, nationality, religion, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability status. And with crimes comes a sort of punishment for the committed actions. But, when a person commits a hate crime, does that person deserve an extra or different type of punishment since it was motivated by hatred or prejudice?
Crimes that are committed because of hate or prejudice should be punished more severely than crimes that are not committed for hatred or prejudice.
In just 2014 there were over 7,000 incidents of hate crimes with more than
200,000 victims of these crimes. Whether or not the offenders of these hate crimes should be punished more severely is a widely known topic for arguing. The understandable explanation for not punishing them more severely is that of freedom of speech. Of which in the United States allows people the right to express their opinions public without government restriction. Some anti­hate crime law supporters claim that there are a majority of crimes caused by hatred, and that that there is no difference between crimes caused by bias and crimes just out of anger. But, there is a difference, biased based hate crimes hurt the surrounding community and sometimes the country to much to not be taken as a different situation and crime. Hate crimes can cause public outbreaks and chaos throughout the community. For example, on August 9, 2014
Michael Brown, a resident of Ferguson Missouri was shot to death by a local police officer. This killing led to a nationwide outrage stating that the shooting was an act of

prejudice towards African Americans. Ferguson, as a result of the shooting, experienced months of protesting and riots. At the end of the unrest it left Ferguson destroyed with millions of dollars in damages. So, as a whole, it had Ferguson as a destroyed community. This is just one of the many incidents of destroyed communities as a result of hate crimes, but also an example of a community whose reputation was ruined by the crime. Hate crimes that are uncontrolled can lead to more violence and a sense of insecurity in communities. According to Samantha Lujan of wordpress.com, author of ,”Hate Crimes affect Communities,” citizens feel insecure about living in a community with a previous hate crime. People within the community, such as one like
Ferguson, MO, can feel threatened by violence and some can even leave the community just because of it. Hate crimes cause much more damage than non­biased crimes too the victims, communities, and nation; therefore they should not be taken as lightly as other comparable crimes. Hate crimes offenders need to be punished more harshly to help prevent these acts of hatred which in turn prevent the further disruptions in the surrounding people.
The harsher punishment of hate crime offenders should be in effect because it would help in the equality and safety of races, ethnicity, gender, religions, nationalities, colors, and disability statuses.Nationwide known hate crimes incidents like these and even other less known hate crimes can cause divisions among races, ethnic origins, religions, and other biased motivated reasons for hate crimes. For example, if a
Christian man killed another man because he was Jewish, this could potentially cause tensions between the people of each religion. These tensions could even lead to more

incidents of hate crimes fueled by the hatred of each others religion. Tensions like these have led to wars and even genocides. Since hate