enced a drop of more than 20 percent in its homicide rate from 1986 to 1996 (homicides are so serious that underreporting is rare, so the FBI's homicide figures are considered to be accurate) (Beres and Griffith, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 112).
California's attorney general immediately attributed the improvement to the Three Strikes Law. A closer examination, however, prompts more questions than answers. For example, despite that drop, California's homicide rate remains higher than the rest of the nation. More importantly, California's rate declined at a slower pace than the rest of the nation (other states have Three Strikes Laws, though none as draconian as California's version). Finally, increased incarceration does not seem to correlate to a reduced crime rate. California has tripled its prison population since 1980 without apparent effect, yet the crime rate ballooned until the mid-1990s (Beres and Griffith, Georgetown Law Journal 107).
Rather than attribute California's drop in crime to Three Strikes, we should be asking why the state l
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