Criminalization is a process of institutionalization that involves the diffusion of legal forms and practices. Conventional approaches to criminalization have been dominated by historical case studies that illuminate the collective action and social structural bases of shifts in crime policy by focusing on the dynamics internal to particular polities. Criminalization is affected by a State's internal political culture and traditions as well as by its location within the larger interstate system. Thus, the diffusion of hate crime policies throughout the United States resembles the diffusion pattern of many other policy reforms. However, as hate crimes diffused, the variety of methods of altering the criminal code diminished while the domain and complexity of the laws increased. Criminalization, and by extension institutionalization, is characterized by countervailing forces: the simultaneous homogenization and differentiation of cultural forms. Notes, tables, figures, references, statutes cited, cases cited