ABC Nightline 4/2: Rethinking "three strikes" laws

[Bozita]

 
Nightline Daily E-Mail
April 2, 2004


TONIGHT'S FOCUS: So-called "three strikes" laws were all the rage a few years ago. Commit a third crime and you go away. Period. But now, a few years later, a number of states are rethinking all this. Maybe it put too many people in prison.

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It is an election season, as you all know, so it's unlikely that anyone is going to be "soft" on crime for the next eight months or so. Instead, candidates at all levels will be vying with each other to see who can be tougher on crime. But we wanted to take a look at one of those "tough" measures, the three-strikes laws, and see how they worked. Those laws were written after people who had already served time for a number of other offenses committed horrific crimes. The thinking was, why should any of those people be back out on the street? If they commit a number of crimes, say three, that's it. Those are all the chances you get. And there is a fair amount of sense to all that. How do you explain to a victim, the loved-one of someone who has been murdered or hurt, that it was right to release the person responsible? That's the emotional argument.

But with those laws in place, what's happened? Well, the prisons have filled up. One thing that seems relatively clear, to many people, is that the prospect of going to prison is not a hugely effective deterrent to committing a crime. Otherwise, by now, you would think that most people would have gotten the message. Or maybe everyone thinks that only the other guys are stupid enough to get caught. We heard a lot of stories about people whose third strike was a relatively minor crime, the equivalent of stealing a loaf of bread, but that resulted in them being sent to prison for life. One of the things the laws did was restrict a lot of the sentencing discretion that judges used to have. But the end result was that prisons got overcrowded. There wasn't enough room. And a large percentage of the "strikes" were for drug offenses, and there is a raging debate over whether treatment or prison is the more effective, and more cost-effective, solution.

So there's a lot to talk about. We welcome new ABC News correspondent Laura Marquez to Nightline tonight. She'll report on one woman's case in California, and how the state of Alabama is having to rethink its laws as the prison system there is swamped with inmates. Chris Bury will anchor; I hope you'll join us.

Leroy Sievers and the Nightline Staff
Nightline Offices
ABCNEWS Washington D.C. bureau