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This essay offers a concise overview of black women’s experiences with early criminal justice, beginning with the colonial period and ending in the early twentieth century. It also identifies aspects of the historiography on black women and crime that merit greater scholarly attention. Historians have examined race and violence, particularly interracial violence, but should also explore intraracial violence in relation to gender, crime, and criminal justice. In an attempt to address some of these gaps, this chapter provides an overview of the incarceration of black women in the United States and explores intraracial intimate partner violence through a late nineteenth-century Philadelphia case. In doing so, it especially examines the conduct and motives of the black woman at the center of the crime.

Scholarship on race, crime, and justice often remains gender blind. Researchers cannot fully understand the influences of race and racism without serious consideration of its gendered dimensions. Distressed minority communities in urban settings have disproportionate rates of violence against women. Structural, organizational, and cultural characteristics heighten gendered risks, including high rates of other crime; male domination of public community spaces; environmental features of neighborhoods; the reluctance of community members to intervene in violence, including the mistreatment of women and girls; acute distrust of the police; and the dominance of cultural norms that support gender inequality and the sexual objectification of young women. Such violence is a critical social problem in need of careful theoretical and policy attention, and is an integral facet of the gendering of racial inequality.

This article analyzes the current legislative approach to combating hate crime. Part I starts with an overview of the key theoretical arguments for and against the use of punishment enhancements for hate crime offenders. Both retribution and consequentialist theories of punishment are examined in detail in order to evaluate whether the increased punishment of hate-motivated offenders can be justified. Part II then outlines the various models of legislation that have been used to legislate for hate crime globally. Hate crime provisions in several jurisdictions (United States, Canada, England and Wales) are examined in order to explore the practical differences between the various models of legislation that have emerged. The final part of the article outlines the practical problems that are frequently faced by law enforcers and prosecutors of hate crime offenses, including the evidential difficulties posed by the inclusion of hate motivation within the law.