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Sentencing Law and Policy
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A Fall Classic?: More on 3 Strikes

By Douglas Berman

Perhaps it is fitting as we head into baseball’s playoff season that the baseball-metaphor criminal justice policy known as Three Strikes is getting a second look in California. (As a baseball aside, this article highlights that California is a particularly interesting baseball state these days.)

I detailed last week here some of the on-going debate over Proposition 66, the initiative on the November ballot to amend California’s Three Strikes law, and a newly released report should make a real impact on the debate and will likely help ensure that the fate of Proposition 66 is not clear until the late innnings of the election.

The new report is from the Justice Policy Institute and is entitled “3 Strikes & You’re Out: An examination of 3-Strike Laws 10 years after their Enactment” (available here). The report marshals a terrific amount of data about the scope and impact of Three Strikes laws in California and other states. The report details that the rate of serious crime over the past 10 years has dropped roughly equivalent amounts in states with and states without Three Strikes laws. The report also highlights that California has incarcerated about four times as many convicts under its Three Strikes law as all 22 other states with such laws combined. Though chock-full of interesting data, I found these statistics particularly noteworthy concerning the scope of California’s Three Strikes law:

Expressed as a rate per 100,000 residents, California’s Three Strikes rate (119.3) is 18 times as great as the average for the other Three Strikes states (6.7).

The 42,322 people incarcerated under California’s Three Strikes law exceed the entire prison population of each of the other Three Strikes states, except Florida and Georgia.
This press release from JPI provides some more statistical highlights from the report, and this AP article details that different conclusions can be drawn from the report’s reports. Also, at this link, you can access a well-done NPR story talking more generally about California’s Three Strikes law and the debate over its possible amendment.