Disparities in Criminal Sentencing in California

This research paper compares and contrast the criminal sentencing process in California, as it applies to persons who are convicted of violent crimes and white collar or economic crimes and others potentially subject to long prison terms under the 1994 Three Strikes law.

In response to rising crime rates and public fears, California criminal sentencing laws and practices have been much more severely and more rigidly applied to violent offenders. In the past decade, white collar criminals also have received stiffer sentences, but the courts still exercise considerable discretion in deciding their fate and rarely impose on them the maximum prison terms permitted by law. Since the passage of the Three Strikes law in 1994, persons who have committed in the past violent and other serious felonies and then commit an additional felony, whether or not the recent felony is violent or serious, face draconian sentences. The rigid application of the Three Strikes law has been somewhat tempered by prosecutorial and judicial discretion, but the courts, the jails and state prisons can potentially be overloaded at considerable cost to taxpayers because of the overreaching nature of the Three Strikes law. The rate of violent crime in California has sharply declined recently, but it is unclear whether this has occurred because or in spite of the Three Strikes law.

1. Even before the adoption of the Three Strikes law in 1994, California's sentencin

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ent criminal offenders are sent to prison, prison sentences for economic or white-collar offenders were relatively rare before the 1980s. Ralph Nader attributed this to "overall regulatory softness toward the crimes of the powerful and the affluent." According to Judge Smith, the spectacle of young blacks receiving long prison terms for stealing small amounts of money and Westinghouse executives getting off with a 30 day jail term and fines for multi-billion dollar antitrust violations in the 1960s provoked "in political terms, . . . the greatest controversy, carrying with it overtones of both racial and class conflict." Current Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer recalls that when he served on the United States Sentencing Commission in the mid-1980s, the Commission found that "courts granted probation to [white-collar] offenders more frequently than in situations involving analogous common law crimes; furthermore, prison terms were less severe for white-collar criminals who did not receive probation." Since many white-collar crimes are interstate, the federal Sentencing Commission took the lead nation-wide in making more uniform and tougher federal sentencing guidelines which in turn enable federal courts to ensure that whi
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Approximate Word count = 3510
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)