The Three Strikes Reform ballot initiative will not fix all of the problems associated with the three strikes law. What it will do is fix the problem of people charged with minor crimes such as stealing a package of shredded cheese, then facing a 25 year to life sentence.
Dan Newman, spokesperson for the campaign in support of the ballot measure, told the Vanguard that the effort to pass this critical reform will pick up now that the measure has officially qualified for November’s ballot.
Mr. Newman argues that this measure resets the law to what it was originally intended to do – put dangerous criminals away for a long time.
“What it will essentially do is what the voters originally intended when they passed the three strikes law,” he said. “What they wanted to do was to make sure that truly dangerous career criminals are off the streets forever, but at the same time not wasting resources within the state, locking up non-violent and non-serious offenders. Forcing taxpayers to pay those bills including to house and provide healthcare for them for the rest of their lives.
This spring, a report from the Legislative Analyst Office reported that the state will be faced with critical decisions as to how the state will be able to provide inmates, especially aging inmates, with medical care that meets constitutional requirements.
Aaron Edwards with the Legislative Analyst’s Office says the cash-strapped state can’t afford to keep paying the $1.5 billion a year on medical care.
“Over time, we’ve been getting closer and closer to the end of the receivership,” Mr. Edwards said in April. “It’s even more important for the legislature to be thinking about how they’re going to transition back to state control of the inmate medical care program.”
At the same time, a study from the Pew Center on the states’ Public Safety Performance Project found that a California prisoner released in 2009 served on average 2.9 years in custody, 50 percent longer than the average offender released in 1990.
“The cost to California taxpayers for this extra time served is $2.2 billion,” said Adam Gelb, who directed that study.
He added, “For violent and career criminals, there’s no question that the money is well spent. The issue is at the other end of the spectrum, that in California and in so many other states across the country lower level offenders have also been swept up in the net. This money can be better spent in other ways.”
One possible solution to this is to find other ways to deal with non-violent non-dangerous criminals. This includes treatment programs and drug courts, and it could include realignment programs, which keep lower-level offenders out of state prison, or sentencing reforms that shift harsh sentences away from non-violent, non-dangerous offenders.
Mr. Newman argues that such long penalties for minor crimes “certainly wasn’t the intent of voters.” In fact, he argues that such penalties can prevent the state from being able to deal with more serious crime.
These policies, he argues, “have resulted in overflowing prisons and underfunded schools.”
As a result of the prison overflow, Mr. Newman pointed out, “The Supreme Court has said that the state has to release thousands of inmates. So we have to make a decision and be smart about this, whether or not we want to release dangerous rapists and murderers or do you want to look at somebody who committed a minor non-violent crime decades ago who is now a senior citizen.”
However, while the law would prevent our cheese thief from facing life in prison, it would not prevent the eventual 8-year sentence for his crime.
The law was written carefully to allow for superstrikes – those who commit murder, rape, child molestation, or other heinous crimes who would not qualify for this reform.
“They would not be impacted no matter what their third strikes was,” Mr. Newman said.
Still, the cheese thief would receive a serious penalty.
“They would receive a serious penalty, no less than the normal sentence, but they wouldn’t automatically put them in prison for the rest of their lives,” he said.
These penalties would be handled now much as a second strike would be handled – with at least the doubling of the sentence.
Reports last year showed that 79 percent of the people in prison under the three strikes law were there not for third strikes, but second strikes.
According to a 2011 San Francisco Chronicle article, “A May 2010 report by the California State Auditor concluded that those now in prison under three strikes will cost the state a total of $19.2 billion. The report also found that about 53 percent of those inmates are serving a sentence for a non-serious, nonviolent crime.”
Still this is a good start – at least for supporters.
“Given the enormity of the fiscal crisis and the prison overcrowding crisis in California, this is a really significant reform,” Dan Newman said. “We can fix the three strikes laws so that we have room to lock up dangerous criminals while generating this $100 million a year to fund schools and fight crime and reduce the share of taxes.”
The fiscal argument seems to have strong backing, even by fiscal conservatives like Grover Norquist.
Mr. Norquist said, “The Three Strikes Reform Act is tough on crime without being tough on taxpayers. It will put a stop to needlessly wasting hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ hard-earned money, while protecting people from violent crime.”
“It’s a broad and deep coalition,” Dan Newman proclaimed. “You have some what would be considered strange bedfellows.”
He pointed out you have Grover Norquist working alongside the NAACP, and the Democratic DA from San Francisco and the Republican DA from Los Angeles who was the candidate in 2010 for Attorney General.
“It’s quite a broad coalition,” he added.
How many district attorneys ultimately sign on is a bit of a question.
“I know a lot were waiting to see if it qualified,” Mr. Newman said. There are so many efforts underway to put measures on the ballot that most elected officials will not endorse measures until they qualify.
Michael Romano of Stanford’s Three Strikes Project appeared in Yolo County last November at the Vanguard‘s fundraiser.
He has called the three strikes law the “worst criminal law in the country.”
The law, he has said, has resulted in life imprisonment for relatively small crimes.
“That is not a way to run a state or a criminal justice policy,” Mr. Romano said. “A life sentence for petty theft or drug possession is excessive.”
—David M. Greenwald reporting
[quote]What it will also do is save the state perhaps $100 million a year, a number that has fiscal conservatives, who do not normally support measures of this sort, jumping on the bandwagon.[/quote]
Glad to see this is a bipartisan effort. My thought is that perhaps DA’s across the state will see which way the public wind is blowing, and perhaps might ease up on who is subjected to the severer aspects of the Three Strikes Law, e.g. cases like the cheese thief…