The Times this morning has this devastating assessment of the impact of the “Three Strikes” law on California. Entitled “Three Strikes Law Has Little Effect”, the article opines:
A decade after it was enacted, California’s three-strikes sentencing law has had little impact on violent crime while costing taxpayers $8 billion to imprison tens of thousands of felons, most of them for nonviolent offenses, according to a study released today.
The report by the Washington, D.C.-based Justice Policy Institute also found that blacks have been imprisoned under the three-strikes law at 10 times the rate of whites, while the rate for Hispanics has been almost 80% greater than for whites.
That $8 billion sure could come in handy these days. One of the scandals in this state is that law and order conservatives fail to admit that their demands for more and more prisons and more draconian sentences are a significant (perhaps the significant) cause of what Gov. Schwarzenegger calls our state’s “spending problem.”
Patterico fact-checks this article pretty nicely. You have to read the story practically to the end before you find out that the Justice Policy Institute is anything other than a disinterested party. Would they also run an article on a study showing the ineffectiveness of gun control, only to bury on p. B-10 the fact that the study was conducted by the NRA?
Perhaps you would feel safer living in a society where three-time felons (twice violent or serious) walk the street, but I sure as hell wouldn’t. In my book, one Polly Klaas was one too many.
I’ve known quite a few repeat offenders whose lives were turned around (AA or Christ or both, usually); the terrible problem with life sentences is that it presumes against the possibility of radical transformation. The fact that Polly Klaas was murdered by a repeat offender does not justify tying the hands of judges so that they are unable to make informed distinctions between those who are genuinely predatory and those who stole one pizza slice too many.
I think we owe it to society to presume that most vicious criminals are not going to be transformed. If some of them are, bully for them, but that doesn’t make their debt to society go away any more than “repenting” of a recent spending spree makes my credit card debt go away. Until we can find away to make dead victims come back to life, “unrape” rape victims, etc., it is critical that we err on the side of protecting innocents against future harm, not on the side of freeing criminals to attack again.
The popular meme on the left about petty thieves getting 25 to life over “one too many slices of pizza” is 99% hype. The 1% non-hype is that someone can get 25 to life if he first commits one too many murders, then commits one too many rapes, and finally goes on to steal one too many slices of pizza, with separate trials and convictions intervening. Petty theft is not a “violent” or “serious” felony qualifying for strike one or two; indeed, barring significant priors, it wouldn’t count as a felony at all.
Sure, it’s hype — but so too is invoking the name of Polly Klaas. Let’s agree to leave both innocent dead kids and pizza out of the discussion, because both are inflammatory and unhelpful…
I can’t agree to that. The pizza canard serves no purpose other than to confuse people as to what the three strikes law does and doesn’t do. No one - or at least, hardly anyone - is outraged by the fact that the third strike can be a relatively minor offense, unless he mistakenly believes that the same is true of the first two also. Once everyone understands that three pizza slices can’t get you 25 to life, people stop caring about pizza.
By contrast, leaving Polly Klaas out of the discussion makes no sense whatsoever. Her murder played a huge role in getting the three strikes law passed in the first place, and for good reason: her killer, Richard Allen Davis, was a 3+ striker himself. If the three strikes law had been passed a few years earlier - say, in response to Patrick Purdy’s mass murder of school children in Stockton in 1989 - Polly would have graduated from college a couple of years ago. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that there are other, equally innocent, LIVE children out there who ARE alive today because the three strikes law made sure that the next Richard Allen Davis couldn’t get to them.