Thirty years ago this week, California’s legislators passed Three Strikes and You’re Out. Billed as one of America’s toughest laws against people with repeat offenses, it was rapidly signed by opportunistic Governor Pete Wilson, who had made “tough on crime,” along with harsh policies targeting undocumented immigrants his key re-election issues. Later that same year, voters overwhelmingly passed Three Strikes through the initiative process as well, ratcheting the draconian policy into place and making it all-but-impossible for legislators to revisit.
In the years that followed, tens of thousands of Californians, overwhelmingly poor and/or Black or Brown, received the unfathomable sentence, mandated by the law, of 25-years-to-life, at minimum, not because of the inherent severity of their “third strike” crime but because the law granted no discretion when it came to the sentence length for these offenses. Thousands more received enhanced sentencing for their second strikes as well.
These men and women were condemned to spend a huge proportion of their lives behind bars, oftentimes for crimes that in-and-of-themselves would have landed them a few months in county jail or, at most, a few years in state prison. Meanwhile, California’s taxpayers were condemned to foot a vast financial bill, paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to imprison each and every one of these people, money that could instead have been spent on genuine public safety interventions such as mental health services, drug treatment facilities, Trauma Recovery Centers, education and job training, and violence intervention programs for young people in resource-deprived communities.
The three of us are familiar with this appalling law at the most intimate of levels, and we are aware of the urgent need to replace ill-thought-out and cruel “tough on crime” measures such as Three Strikes with the sorts of social service and mental health interventions that have a far more verifiable track record of genuinely reducing violent crime.
Two of us, Annie and Jess Nichol, lost their sister, Polly Klaas, to a senseless and horrific kidnapping and murder in 1993; it was largely in the wake of this monstrous crime and the 24/7 news coverage that followed in its wake, that public support for Three Strikes skyrocketed.
In the months and years following Polly’s murder, Three Strikes was marketed as almost a monument to her death. Annie and Jess have long believed it has been a disgraceful appropriation of an unthinkable familial trauma for political gain, one that trivializes the tragedy of Polly’s murder by lumping vast numbers of relatively low-end crimes in with that killing of a young child, equating them all as equally meriting a life sentence. Quite simply, those who used Polly’s death to score political points should bear the shame of dishonoring her name and memory.
Co-author, Zakiya Prince, was separated from her husband Tyrone when he received a Three Strikes sentence in 2003 for the burglary of an unoccupied house, in which he never physically entered himself, two years earlier. Zakiya’s husband spent 21 years in jail and prison for this crime (two before trial, 19 after being convicted), before finally gaining parole last year. His parole was made possible due to the fact that over the past few years, California’s voters have, to their credit, passed some modest reforms via the initiative process, allowing certain incarcerated people to be eligible for parole review before their 25 year, or more, minimum sentences are up and limiting the sorts of crimes that qualify people for Three Strikes charges in the first place.
Yet those reforms have had only a limited impact: overall, only one-third of parole applicants in California, including newly eligible Three Strikers, are granted parole by the board. Tyrone was among this small percentage who are currently found suitable for parole. Thousands of others continue to languish in prison decades into their three strikes sentences.
Tyrone has trained to become a Class A truck driver, but because the strict conditions of his parole limit his journeys to within fifty miles of the Los Angeles County line, he hasn’t yet been able to find work in trucking. That doesn’t help him reintegrate into their community; nor, in making it harder for Tyrone to find decent-paying employment, does it make their community safer.
Limited to living in the LA area by the terms of his parole, Tyrone hasn’t been able to join Zakiya and their two daughters in San Diego, where they live. Thus, getting on for a quarter century after the crime for which he was ultimately sentenced under the Three Strikes law, the Prince family remains fractured.
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In recent years, California has gone from having one of the most mindlessly “tough” criminal justice policies of any state in the country to making a series of genuine commitments to reduce the footprint of the prison system and to invest in alternatives to incarceration and in social services for those coming out of prison at the backend of their sentences. The prison population has been reduced from a high of more than 165,000 in 2006 to fewer than 95,000 today. We believe that trend is a positive one, yet California, by virtue of the large size of its population, still has more people imprisoned than any other state except Texas, and there is still much to be done to mitigate the disastrous consequences of Three Strikes and You’re Out.
Our hope is that, on this thirtieth anniversary of the law’s passage, we can finally have a genuine conversation about 1) how to get beyond the clutches of this entirely destructive, and counterproductive law and 2) what we as a state, a community of people who, at the core, all want to be safe, must do to ensure that we do not allow a history of badly thought through laws such as Three Strikes to repeat itself. In a world of finite resources, we must, surely, do better with our tax dollars than simply locking thousands of people up, at vast financial and moral expense, for 25-years-to-life.
A San Francisco native, Zakiya Prince’s husband was sentenced to 25 years-to-life under Three Strikes. Annie and Jess Nichol are the sisters of the late Polly Klaas, whose 1993 murder resulted in the passage of the Three Strikes law in California.