Striking Out
How a tougher approach to sentencing strained the justice system and deepened inequalities.
2 min read · from UNINTENDED by Mayank Mehta
In 1994, California passed a law with a name borrowed from baseball: Three Strikes and You Are Out. The premise was blunt and satisfying. If you were convicted of three serious felonies, you went to prison for life. No exceptions. No negotiation. The public, exhausted by rising crime in the 1980s and early 1990s, overwhelmingly supported it. It felt decisive. It felt fair. It felt safe.
For a while, the numbers seemed to back it up. Crime rates declined. Repeat offenders were off the streets. Communities felt protected.
The unintended consequences arrived soon enough.
The law didn't distinguish between a violent third offense and a trivial one. Life sentences were handed down for shoplifting, for petty drug possession, for crimes that in any other circumstance would carry a few months in jail. Courtrooms became clogged, because defendants facing life in prison stopped accepting plea deals and insisted on full trials. The system, already strained, ground toward gridlock.
Prisons swelled with aging inmates serving life sentences for minor offenses. The cost of housing them, providing medical care, and maintaining an ever-growing incarcerated population skyrocketed. California was spending more per prisoner per year than many families earned.
Some of the behavioral responses were predictable in retrospect. Repeat offenders facing a potential third strike became more dangerous, not less, because the penalty for getting caught was so catastrophic that escape or violence seemed rational by comparison. Others fled to states with less severe sentencing, simply relocating the problem.
Prosecutors, aware of the harshness, sometimes declined to file third-strike charges, introducing exactly the kind of inconsistency the law was supposed to eliminate. Juries, knowing that a guilty verdict could mean life imprisonment for a nonviolent crime, sometimes refused to convict at all.
The law that promised to make justice simple had instead made it blunt. As Einstein once warned, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Three Strikes took a system full of complexity and applied a rule designed for a game. It turned out that justice isn't baseball, and human lives don't lend themselves to tidy scorecards.