NEW YORK, NY – The origins of the “Three Strikes Laws” can be traced to the early 1900s eugenics movement, according to a recent report by Daniel Loehr for The Sentencing Project that argues the laws continue to be used as a tool of discrimination.
“Habitual criminal” laws emerged from the “tough-on-crime” movement in the 1980s and 1990s and “are sentencing laws that significantly increase the length of a sentence based on an individual’s prior convictions,” writes Loehr, an Associate Professor of Law at City University of New York School of Law.
During this period, Loehr said many states imposed these laws in the form of the “Three Strikes and You’re Out” laws. Loehr explains these laws require judges to impose life sentences after a third conviction and were adopted in states such as Washington and California..
Loehr reports the origin of these laws stemmed from the eugenics movement in the early 1900s, whose goal was to create “a superior race in order to address social problems such as crime and disease, which the movement assumed had a biological basis.”
Those who were deemed inferior, Loehr writes, such as racial minorities and the mentally ill, were convicted to prevent them from reproducing. Loehr explains these beliefs supported the country’s “habitual offender” laws.
One prominent example Loehr used to demonstrate the deep intersection of eugenics and racism is the eugenics found in Nazi Germany, noting, “Nazi planners appropriated and incorporated eugenics as they implemented racial policy and genocide.”
Loehr then describes how, in the U.S., eugenicists believed in “habitual crime” and that certain people were predisposed to commit crimes.
Therefore, from a eugenicist viewpoint, Loehr explains, the best way to prevent convictions was to “prevent certain people individuals who had been convicted of crimes from reproducing. And it is this set of beliefs that originally underpinned the county’s ‘habitual offender’ laws.”
To illustrate the spread of these “habitual offender” laws, Loehr notes that by the mid-20th century, 42 states enforced them. These laws, he maintains, were written in “explicitly eugenic terms” and functionally imposed sentences long enough to bar reproduction.
Loehr said the eugenics movement spread to Germany as well when the Nazis rose to power in 1933, implementing a “habitual offender” law “nearly identical to the American versions within a year.”
Loehr contrasts the U.S. and Germany, noting that after World War II, Germany repealed its “habitual offender” laws due to their association with eugenics, whereas the U.S. continued enforcing them.
Loehr adds the theory of eugenics fell into disrepair, but, despite its origins, “‘habitual offender’ laws are still in force in 49 (U.S.) states.”
Loehr stresses that understanding the eugenic origins of these laws reveals contradictions in their continued enforcement, explaining the two premises—“that criminality is heritable, and second that it is appropriate to attempt to control the reproduction of a population in order to eradicate them”—are widely rejected ideas.
Yet, as Loehr concludes, “If we condemn eugenics, we ought to condemn one of the crowning achievements of the eugenics movement: ‘habitual criminal’ laws and their associated long sentences.”
