Three-Strikes Law Has Little Effect, Study Says

[depakid]

A new study just confirms what most of us have known all along- that harsh, retributive mandatory sentences are very expense ways to perpetrate injustice while doing little to improve public safety....

LA Times, March 5

A decade after it was enacted, California's three-strikes sentencing law has had little impact on violent crime while costing taxpayers $8 billion to imprison tens of thousands of felons, most of them for nonviolent offenses, according to a study released today.

The report by the Washington, D.C.-based Justice Policy Institute also found that blacks have been imprisoned under the three-strikes law at 10 times the rate of whites, while the rate for Hispanics has been almost 80% greater than for whites.

<snip>

Nearly 65% of those convicted of second or third strikes were serving time in prison for nonviolent crimes. They included 672 third-strikers serving 25 years to life in prison for drug possession — a number that was greater than the number of third-strikers in prison for second-degree murder, assault with a deadly weapon and rape combined.

<snip>

What our studies show is that California's three-strikes law costs too much, does too little and targets the wrong people. And particularly in these times of fiscal crisis in the state, California cannot afford to do that," said Vincent Schiraldi, coauthor of the study and executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, a left-leaning research and public policy organization.

More...

[R Hickey]

1. Republicans always grow prisons while always shrinking schools.

One of the biggest differences between Democrats and Republicans is this:

Democrats favor spending money on schools, while Republicans always prefer spending money on prisons.

[sweetheart]

2. American justice is not justice

The 3 strikes law is another example of the misnaming of the justice
system. It is a system of torture, inhumane and stupid expensive
punative torture.

The endemic racism and rape in prisons shows what america is really
about.

Good that *some* left leaning thinktanks exist to tell the truth.

[Occulus]

3. Bull,

if you pronounce it correctly.

The American just-us system.

(Think of the Lily Tomlin telephone joke. That kind of sentiment.)

[sweetheart]

4. telephone joke?

Good phrase the "just-us" system.

I used to know someone who is now locked away under 3 strikes for
drugs posession. It is the most intensely injust thing, really
sick. The taxpayer is paying for his retirement, whilst the
man has no evil in his heart, and has done no harm to anyone.

He was pursuing his God-given liberty to eat whatever food and drugs
he felt he needed... and for self-medicating, he is lost to us,
the living dead, buried in a hole by sick society.

It isn't a joke. There is no "us" in just-us. Rather it
is "just-them".. some bunch of sick lawmaking losers and prison
industrial corporations and evil police sticking it to the
people who are on the bottom.