So, I have a question - would repealing the 3-strikes rule really have that much of a difference on the percentage of the population who is (or will be) incarcerated? In other words, what is the percentage of the currently incarcerated population that is there because they are indeed criminals who have no desire to be reformed?

The cause is somewhat twofold. The problem isn't JUST that we are incarcerating repeat offenders longer, but also that we have more repeat offenders. Is the solution to stop incarcerating repeat offenders as harshly or to try to decrease the number of repeat offenders?

A significant issue is that any solution dealing with the latter probably won't take significant effect for 20 years.

Of course we shouldn't just not jail repeat offenders. But there's no denying that incarceration is expensive, nor that there's a fairly high rate of recidivism (though again, that varies by crime). It's all well and good to get criminals off of the streets (especially dangerous ones), but you also can't pretend that that experience stops them from offending again.

So you end up stuck in a situation where you pay $X to reduce crime for a set period, and can estimate the percentage of crime you will re-introduce to an area if you stop spending that money. You can even break that down by type of crime if you want, to more precisely estimate the cost of reducing the crime rate by incarceration. So you end up with a number that describes at least roughly how much society pays (in dollars) for every reduction of crime caused by repeat offenders being in jail.

I don't know that number, but whatever it is I would imagine that building more prisons to accomodate more prisoners is going to be an expensive investment. And anything that reduces the recidivism rate (or otherwise reduces the crime rate) will reduce the value of that investment for its shareholders (now the companies that own the prisons), even though it produces value for society and for taxpayers.

It's that mismatch of incentives that troubles me. Even with three strikes, the US incarceration rate has increased despite a drop in crime rate, and recidivism doesn't explain that at all. We're investing in prisons and the industry of imprisonment, paying something like $60 per offender per day to keep our crime rate low, and we know that there's no long term benefit to this investment. It only works immediately and as we continue to pay. And that would suit the prison industry just fine.

Even if we leave today's prison budget as it is, there's absolutely no reason not to invest in anything that might reduce the need for those prisons against their future costs. And if we can accept that, strikes and recidivists aside, some people don't need to be in jail to protect society (like non-violent drug offenders, for example), we can use the money that we would have spent jailing them to try and reduce recidivism for more serious criminals. At the rate linked above, if we kept 100 such low-to-no-harm offenders out of prison, that's ~$6.24 million that can be allocated elsewhere-- like to trying to reduce recidivism.

Even if reducing the recidivism rate will take a while, prison is too expensive not to make the attempt. It certainly sounds like a better investment to me than building ever more prisons while the crime rate continues to fall.

I was countering his statement that it was an isolated incident.

But now you mention it I'll counter the argument that such situations are a minority of cases. Evidence has been presented in this thread that at least half of Americans in prison are in for non-violent crimes. By extension, and unless evidence is presented to the contrary (evidence I haven't been able to find), we can assume that about half of three-strikes are also due to non-violent crimes.

On a national (or even statewide) scale, three incidents aren't much less isolated than one. You will never get to a statistically significant number of such cases presenting them one at a time. If you present statistics, you've presented evidence. If you present a story, you've presented a story, whether the conclusion you draw from it (or them) is accurate or not.

And I don't think that you can extend the non-violent crime statistics that way. First, the point that tstrimple was making is about people three-striked for petty crimes, not non-violent ones. It might still make sense to get a strike against you if you're a national-level heroin dealer, after all.

Second, you can only make that extension if strikes are evenly distributed among the prison population (or would be, if strike laws were consistent and present in all locations). This may be the case, and is especially likely to be if strikes are given out freely, even for petty crimes. But it's a big assumption to make that all crimes are essentially equal, and if you want to posit it then it's on you to demonstrate that those conditions are true.

@AndyEsser: Sweet! I've never been quoted in someone's forum signature before!

On topic (I wrote this yesterday, but the forum was down when I wen't to post, so the following may not address recent comments):


I believe, and I think we can all agree, that people convicted of crimes should go to jail. Nothing surprising there.

If we then look at our prison population and its past and projected growth rate, we should also all *agree* that there is a problem, and we should all be *willing to entertain* the possibility that something is going quite wrong with things.

Then you begin to look at what factors contribute to the population, and particularly to the sudden change in the population. Some of these are:
Length of sentences
Rate of sentencing
Criminalization itself
Cause of crimes
The length of prison terms has gone up drastically -- I would say that three-strikes has probably had the greatest impact on median sentence length -- when you add to the prison system a three-time petty criminal for 25 years, its going to skew the population in a huge way. These are people who might go through life as a petty criminal, bet see only frequent, short sentences that might never add up to anything close to 25 years over their lifetime.

Mandatory minimum is the same -- it takes power from the judge to, you know, judge the circumstances and character of a person, and to take that into account. Criminals should get exactly what they deserve -- no less, and equally importantly, no more. "tough" sentences are essentially the same, just bounded by political performance rather than any prescribed "solution".

I'm not saying we should simply let people slide forever, but that our prison and law-enforcement dollars would probably be better spent on more damaging criminal activity.

Rate of sentencing ties into both "tough on crime" and criminalization itself. Overzealous police and prosecutors can be eager to show their effectiveness by putting more asses in the defendants chair (not to disparage law enforcement at all, my younger brother is a Sheriff's Deputy) -- the fact is, the general population is so scared by the boogeyman of crime, the black cloud of "the slippery slope", and not too inclined to examine real statistics for themselves, or even to seek out any more in-depth analysis than 30 seconds on the evening news -- its easy to see: despite lower actual crime, people are more scared than ever. And of course, they demand action. A police force, prosecutor or judge who doesn't appear to be "tough" doesn't have long to make an impact.

Criminalization itself, along with the means to fund enforcement, is precisely the same boogeyman argument -- its just doled out and perpetrated by career politicians and those who stand to benefit from the result of said criminalization. I don't think that anyone can argue that, say, the use of Marijuana -- taking away crimes surrounding its trafficing and sale -- causes more societal ill than alcohol, or causes a greater public health risk than tobacco. Yet, Alcohol and Tobacco are perfectly legal, and even possessing/using even small amounts of marijuana is criminalized. Not only is this a backwards way of thinking, such backward laws enable serious crime (crime surrounding traffic and sale, and by funding criminals and criminal organizations) and also diminish respect for legitimate, reasonable laws. In essence, they undermine our system of laws, while simultaneously furthering criminal endeavors.

Then you have to consider why crime exists in the first place. I view crime largely the same as I view piracy -- That is, some people will always commit crime and no amount of punishment or opportunity will change that (these people should be in prison), others are driven by cultural issues, others are driven by a lack of legitimate opportunity (which is a societal failure). There are many, many factors that contribute to the cause of crime, none of which go away simply by putting criminals into jails -- as long as the reasons still exist, more criminals will simply fill their vacant position. Putting a criminal in jail as a sole means of repurcussion does not have a 1-1 correlation with removing a criminal from the streets. It removes *a particular* criminal, and replaces him with one or more -- likely ones which are young, stupid, impressionable, and eager to show how "hard" they are by showing utter recklessness and a complete disregard for collateral damages. Its easy to see how things have escallated over the years -- The Mafia was certainly violent back in the day, but generally amongst themselves legitimate threats to their business (competing gangs, police, judges, prosecutors, perhaps jurors and witnesses) not to excuse them, but you at least have to respect that they kept their squabbles within a certain purview. A violent street gang today is more than happy to beat or kill over even a perceived threat and the worst of them have been reported to make sport of unsuspecting police officers and the general public as part of initiation, or simply to make a point. The old criminals at least had some "sense" to their violence (for lack of a better term), while today a lot of the violence is senseless, or taken to a senseless level. I'd take an old-guard criminal over some dumb young kid on the street any day of the week.

Anyhow, if we re-provisioned our sentencing guidelines, dropped the "tough" act, got rid of 3-strikes for non-violent offenders, and decriminalized marijuana, we would see a dramatic shift in the prison population within a 5 years time, and if we commuted the sentences of those already in prison to match the new guidelines, we could see that change literally overnight -- not to say that we necessarily should, since letting a bunch of criminals out of prison with no economic growth to support them on the outside is probably a recipe for disaster (then again, there's never going to be a perfect time to flip the switch either.)

The difficulty of this type of change is similar to the difficulty of instituting public healthcare -- we in America are a bunch of fat, lazy, chain-smoking, diabetic slobs (not everyone, but to an uncomfortable margin) who hate visiting the doctor for any type of preventative care, and as a result, any switch to a public system is going to cost the initial participants a lot of money to pay for the health sins we all commit. It would be much less of a burden on a generally-healthier population that participated in preventative care. Basically, we've allowed the root causes of our ills progress so far that any drastic solution has long-since crossed the line of discomfort, and simply continuing on as we always have appears to be the less uncomfortable course in the near-medium term.

And I don't think that you can extend the non-violent crime statistics that way. First, the point that tstrimple was making is about people three-striked for petty crimes, not non-violent ones.

Actually at no point did he mention the word petty in his post tbh. As far as I can see he didn't really specify what kind of crimes he thought were not being three-striked very often apart from pointing at theft as an example. I generalised into non-violent crimes because I think that's really the issue here. Your extreme example of a national-level heroin dealer is not relevant imo because there aren't very many of them either in prison or out of prison given that someone responsible for dealing heroin on a national level is going to be at the head of a large and violent organisation.

But it's a big assumption to make that all crimes are essentially equal, and if you want to posit it then it's on you to demonstrate that those conditions are true.[/quote]

I didn't make that assumption. I simply assumed that since they are being given for even extremely petty crimes they are also being given for most non-violent crimes, and that given at least half of all offenders are non-violent then about half of all three strikes will be for non-violent crimes. Logical extensions as far as I can see.

Apart from that I think three strikes is a good policy. It takes habitual offenders out of circulation. Vary rarely is it actually the person's third time of committing a crime, more often they have a long history of breaking the law.

The cases you mention don't seem to be failures of the three strikes policy, rather failures of the judge in applying common sense sentencing.

But theoretically, and in practice, it can be a case of someone's third crime, even if they are not very serious ones. And that is an extremly disturbing idea because there is probably a massive number of people that fall into that potential life imprisonment envelope.

EDIT: also, I think we can all agree that the definition of what constitutes a crime, serious or no, is not a fixed absolute. Tomorrow it could include something that seems innocent or even good to you. In fact that's probably the case already.

Actually at no point did he mention the word petty in his post tbh. As far as I can see he didn't really specify what kind of crimes he thought were not being three-striked very often apart from pointing at theft as an example. I generalised into non-violent crimes because I think that's really the issue here. Your extreme example of a national-level heroin dealer is not relevant imo because there aren't very many of them either in prison or out of prison given that someone responsible for dealing heroin on a national level is going to be at the head of a large and violent organisation.

It was clearly the intent of his post to refer to less serious crimes, even if he actually say petty. How else would you categorize shoplifting, which you presented as an example of a minor crime sometimes counted as a strike?

I used the heroin dealer as an example because it would be clear in demonstrating my point, not because it happens every day. I agree with you that it is not a model of typical three-strike behavior, just one where we could probably agree that even without direct violence on the part of the prisoner a strike wouldn't be unreasonable.

I'll only grant that non-violent crimes are the issue if we agree that violent crimes are the only ones worthy of a strike. You could probably persuade me of that, but at present I don't think so. We already agree that small time stuff shouldn't count, and that probably would apply to very minor violent crimes as well.

I didn't make that assumption. I simply assumed that since they are being given for even extremely petty crimes they are also being given for most non-violent crimes, and that given at least half of all offenders are non-violent then about half of all three strikes will be for non-violent crimes. Logical extensions as far as I can see.
[/quote]

If and only if strikes are truly routinely given for all crimes great and small, and that this strike-giving at least roughly follows an even distribution throughout the prison population. So the assumption isn't that all strikes are equal (poorly expressed on my part in my last post), but that all crimes are treated equally for the purposes of accruing to a strike. What you are describing is essentially the worst-case scenario for strike application, and then presenting it as a moderate estimate.

The only evidence that you've given that supports this so far are three seperate instances where people were given three strikes for petty crime each time. Again, I agree that these people should never have been three-striked as presented, but three individuals does not a system-wide pattern make.

How many people would need to get three strikes this way to demonstrate a pattern? If there are ~171,000 adults in prison (linked below), and even 1% of them are there for similar reasons as the three examples you gave, that's 1,710 people. While that's not a number that you will reach giving examples one by one, it's a pretty small number compared to the whole. Yyou are attributing the experiences of three people (.00002% of the total population) to all of them.

Have a look at this that I dug up. The violent crime percentage for CA prison inmates is about 50% (slightly higher, but close enough), and increasing. About 26% of prison inmates in CA are on their 2nd or 3rd strike. Some of those strikers are undoubtedly in for BS reasons, which is difficult to estimate because I haven't been able to find a breakdown of strikes given by crime classification.

But even if 100% of potentially-striker non-violent offenders in prison in CA were there because of strikes and strikes alone, that would still be about a quarter of the total prison population, not half. And even that maximum possible number assumes that none of the violent offenders are there due to strikes. That's a dubious claim, because three strikes was enacted to curb violent crime most of all, and is undoubtedly going to be applied to violent criminals, especially if it's also applied indiscriminately to non-violent criminals.

So that particular extension isn't well supported analytically, seeing as it makes an assumption about how all strikes are applied based on a handful of cases. It's also not well supported empirically, as even with the most generous assumptions strikes don't account for more than a quarter or so of inmates, over half of whom are in fact violent offenders. I still agree with you as far as the value of three strikes policies go-- but to say that half of three-strikers are in for purely non-violent behavior is a stretch which it is not necessary to make, given the abundance of reasons to oppose the current implementations of the policy.

It amazes me how people focus on this isolated incident where a ship-lifter gets hit with three strikes. This is FAR from the norm.

FWIW, I'm not focussing on that isolated incident -- the sentiment applies to all cases of unnecessary incarceration.

Does the threat of incarceration reduce crime rates -- no.
Does incarceration help rehabilitate repeat offenders -- no.
Does incarceration reinforce criminality -- yes.
Is the punishment of incarceration proportional to the crime -- sometimes, often not.
Is the US using incarceration for purposes where evidence demonstrates that it's a bad idea -- yes.
Are the root causes of these criminal behaviours being addressed -- no.