"Three Strikes and You're Out: A Bad Crime Policy

"Three Strikes and You're Out" crime laws, which are now in effect in almost 20 states in the U.S., are essentially laws that mandate that an individual who commits three of a certain group of felonies receives a mandatory prison sentence ranging from 25 years to life (Mauer, 1996). Walker's Proposition #20 states succinctly that "three strikes and you're out" laws are a terrible crime policy. In this essay, arguments supporting Walker's Proposition #20 will be advanced.

Mandatory sentencing laws have become very popular in recent years. The Bureau of Justice Assistance reported that virtually every state and the federal government have enacted some type of mandatory sentencing law (Stolzenberg & D'Alessio, 1997). The primary purpose of these laws is to increase the severity of criminal sanctions, requiring that offenders who are found guilty of certain crimes serve fixed minimum prison terms. At its heart, these policies target chronic or habitual offenders rather than first-time or even second-time offenders. However, as Stolzenberg and D'Alessio (1997) pointed out, long before the "three strikes" legislation was introduced in California, most states had habitual offender statutes which made it possible for a convicted offender with a prior record to receive longer prison sentences than otherwise might be granted including life in prison without the possibility of parole.

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ative effects of the "three strikes" legislation identified by this analyst include prison overcrowding and heightened costs for managing and operating prisons. According to Fannan (2002), the average cost of incarcerating an inmate in California is about $25,600 per year, a figure that triples when an inmate becomes elderly and needs more health care. This results in about $1.5 million to incarcerate a third strike prisoner for 25 years. If 1,000 individuals are jailed nationwide under this legislation, the total cost to society would be $1.5 billion û a figure larger than the gross domestic product of some small countries. Another artifact of these laws is that the cost of the court system itself has increased. There are thousands of offenders that are being charged under "three strikes" in many jurisdictions. The overall criminal justice caseload is therefore increased as is the number of individuals held in county jail awaiting trial û a pre-trial incarceration policy that is accompanied by its own economic costs in terms of facility expansion, staffing, health and other programs, and so forth. As Fannan (2002) notes, these indirect costs are rarely taken into consideration when proponents of the three strikes sys
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Approximate Word count = 2182
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)