The purpose of punishment is deterrence and that is why hate crime laws are needed

Society sends people to prison for three reasons. One, to punish. Secondly, to rehabilitate. Thirdly, to isolate. All are valid purposes for society. Punishment serves to deter crime by making people think before engaging in the crime. Rehabilitation works after the fact by help a criminal make better choices in the future. Isolation keeps dangerous people away from potential victims.

All things being equal, some crimes are easier to deter than others. Bank robbery is a very uncommon crime in this country because most bank robbers get caught and the penalty for robbing banks is very stiff. Prostitution is a fairly common crime because it is hard to catch people in the act and the penalty is fairly low. There are a multitude of ways for society to prevent crimes. Property crimes can be prevented by making it easier to make money than steal it. Legalizing drugs would help alot to prevent property crimes and prostitution. Other crimes can only really be prevented by deterrence. Sexual predators are really only deterred or cured. Hate criminals are similarly hard to deter.

Crimes that are harder to deter need stiffer punishments. No amount of money can deter these crimes. Education also won't really work. Some people have such empty lives that they hate people who are different from them. The numbers of those people will rise and fall according to the state of society but some will exist. Those people need to be hammered in order for them to engage in these crimes.

Just recently two people in New Mexico were given four years for their part in a brutal beating of an 18 year old. They kidnapped him for the whole night and beat him all night to make him straight. For hour after hour after hour after hour after hour this kid was beaten so he would change. And the people got 4 years. Just how much deterrence is that?

I can't prevent myself from being beaten up for being gay by being more careful or educating straight people. Society has only one way to stop these crimes. Deterrence is that way.

We need that much and so do you.

are intended to intimidate a CLASS of people - so I can see the justification of an additional penalty.

But how do we prevent White-Collar crime? Or is that even possible?

instead of the company under audit.

There's too much temptation and opportunity to fudge the numbers even if we're not talking about out and out fraud.

I think that would deter many of them.

I'd love to see life without parole.

Incapacitation is the primary purpose of direct punishment. When someone commits a crime the major focus of punishment is incapacitation ( ie keeping that person away from society so that society is not threatened by that person) Direct deterrence is number two- keeping that offender from committing the crime again. General deterrence is the type of deterrence that you mention. If we see that people who commit a crime get a certain punishment, we will be less likely to commit the same crime.

If it was, there would be nobody on Death Row for murder and our prisons wouldn't be perpetually overpopulated. Laws as deterrent only work sometimes and only on people who aren't determined to commit a crime in the first place. So, I'm sorry, but I, and the evidence, completely disagree with you.

Prevention is what's necessary, but the answer to what that is and how to go about it isn't as simple as one word. We have to change peoples' minds. That can't be done with a penny tax or a three hour lecture. We need to end poverty. We need to make education a priority rather than a hassle. We need to care about each other. None of these things can be accomplished with a catchy phrase you can chant at rallies. And they can't be accomplished by simply adding more laws or making harsher punishments, either.

First, it is absurd to say deterrence doesn't work. The death penalty is a ridiculous example for that. The death penalty is used very sparingly and for crimes that have life in prison as an alternative. If we applied the death penalty in all murder cases it would likely be a more effective deterent, but still wrong for the government to use. But your larger point, is able to be refuted in several ways. Look at drunk driving. It used to be something that was done literally all the time. Now, most people wouldn't drunk drive in large part because we have decided to get serious about it.

Economics has little to do with hate crimes. I will grant it has some to do with it in that people who are poor are more likely to fall for hateful ideologies but there are plenty of rich haters.

Theft is illegal. Speeding is illegal. Assault is illegal. Yet, despite these laws and their "deterrent" punishments, people continue to commit them daily. The death penalty is a perfect example, because even the threat of death does nothing to stop the crimes to which the death penalty applies. Thus, by definition, they are all ineffective as a deterrent, so you've bought into a bunch of hogwash.

Your head must really be in the sand if you believe drunk driving has somehow been reduced by people "getting tough" on it. In fact, many DUIs are repeat offenders. Even revoking driver's licenses does nothing to prevent someone from driving, it simply adds another punishment if they are caught. That isn't refuting my point at all.

Poverty, and everything associated with it, has everything to do with crime, hate-motivated or otherwise. There's no one more dangerous than someone who has nothing to lose. Stop believing everything you're told and get out and meet some people.

has rarely been deterrence.

Further reading:
Bentham's Panopticon is, for Foucault, an ideal architectural model of modern disciplinary power. It is a design for a prison, built so that each inmate is separated from and invisible to all the others (in separate "cells") and each inmate is always visible to a monitor situated in a central tower. Monitors will not in fact always see each inmate; the point is that they could at any time. Since inmates never know whether they are being observed, they must act as if they are always objects of observation. As a result, control is achieved more by the internal monitoring of those controlled than by heavy physical constraints.

The principle of the Panopticon can be applied not only to prisons but to any system of disciplinary power (a factory, a hospital, a school). And, in fact, although Bentham himself was never able to build it, its principle has come to pervade every aspect of modern society. It is the instrument through which modern discipline has replaced pre-modern sovereignty (kings, judges) as the fundamental power relation.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/#3.3

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations. Bentham was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: there were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks; all that was needed was that the separations should be clear and the openings well arranged. The heaviness of the old 'houses of security', with their fortress-like architecture, could be replaced by the simple, economic geometry of a 'house of certainty'. The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side - to the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance.

<snip>

So much for the question of observation. But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try out pedagogical experiments - and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans. One would see what would happen when, in their sixteenth or eighteenth year, they were presented with other boys or girls; one could verify whether, as Helvetius thought, anyone could learn anything; one would follow 'the genealogy of every observable idea'; one could bring up different children according to different systems of thought, making certain children believe that two and two do not make four or that the moon is a cheese, then put them together when they are twenty or twenty-five years old; one would then have discussions that would be worth a great deal more than the sermons or lectures on which so much money is spent; one would have at least an opportunity of making discoveries in the domain of metaphysics. The Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them. The Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms. In this central tower, the director may spy on all the employees that he has under his orders: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, warders; he will be able to judge them continuously, alter their behaviour, impose upon them the methods he thinks best; and it will even be possible to observe the director himself. An inspector arriving unexpectedly at the centre of the Panopticon will be able to judge at a glance, without anything being concealed from him, how the entire establishment is functioning. And, in any case, enclosed as he is in the middle of this architectural mechanism, is not the - 5 director's own fate entirely bound up with it ? The incompetent physician who has allowed contagion to spread, the incompetent prison governor or workshop manager will be the first victims of an epidemic or a revolt. ' "By every tie I could devise", said the master of the Panopticon, "my own fate had been bound up by me with theirs"' (Bentham, 177). The Panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power. Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's behaviour; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised.

http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html

Most people who commit serious crimes don't care about consequences. Their denial comes by way of different means...they think their actions are justified...or they won't get caught...or convicted...or simply don't care anyway.
I kept a record of executions and murders in Florida for 15 years when I lived there. Unfortunately I lost my ledger when I moved but I can say for certain that there was a -higher- incidence of murders during the subsequent period after someone sat in Old Sparky.
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