Three Strikes Laws: Life Sentences for Petty Crime

Three-strikes laws promised to lock up career criminals. What California’s version actually produced was 25-years-to-life sentences for stealing pizza and videotapes. California’s Proposition 184, passed by voters in November 1994, required a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life for any felony conviction when a defendant had two prior serious or violent felony convictions — including non-violent offenses. No judicial discretion, no proportionality review. Applied at 13 times the rate against Black defendants as white defendants in Los Angeles County, the law cost the state billions and reduced crime no faster than states without it.^1^

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The Political Moment That Made Three Strikes Inevitable

Three-strikes laws emerged from a specific political moment: 1993 and 1994, when crime rates were near their peak, several high-profile murders of children had dominated news coverage, and the Republican Party had successfully made crime into a wedge issue that Democratic politicians scrambled to neutralize by competing to appear tougher.

Polly Klaas was abducted from her home in Petaluma, California, on October 1, 1993, and murdered by Richard Allen Davis, a man with an extensive criminal history who had been released on parole. Her death became the emotional centerpiece of California’s three-strikes movement. Mike Reynolds, a Fresno photographer whose daughter had been murdered by a repeat offender in 1992, had been pursuing a three-strikes initiative since before the Klaas case. The Klaas murder gave it the political momentum it needed.

The federal three-strikes provision — mandatory life imprisonment after a third violent felony conviction — was included in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, signed by President Clinton on September 13, 1994. That same law provided $9.7 billion in federal funding for state prison construction and $6.1 billion for crime prevention.^2^

What California’s Law Produced in Practice

California’s Proposition 184 was extreme because it allowed the third strike to be any felony, not necessarily a serious or violent one. The RAND Corporation’s 1996 analysis of the law’s first year of operation found that it was being applied disproportionately to drug offenses and property crimes, not violent crimes, and was expected to double California’s prison population within a decade at a cost of $4.5 to $6.5 billion annually by 2002.^1^

Among the cases that drew public attention: Leandro Andrade, with two prior burglary convictions, was sentenced to two consecutive terms of 25 years to life for stealing nine videotapes from Kmart stores in 1995 — tapes valued at approximately $153. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the sentence 5-4 in Lockyer v. Andrade (2003), finding it did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Jerry Dewayne Williams was sentenced to 25 years to life in 1995 for stealing a slice of pizza from a group of children in Redondo Beach. Williams had four prior felonies on his record. The trial judge called the sentence excessive but said the law gave him no choice.

How the Racial Targeting Worked

The racial distribution of three-strikes prosecutions in California followed the same pattern as other drug war enforcement: Black Californians were sentenced under the three-strikes law at dramatically higher rates than white Californians. A 1996 study by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found that, in Los Angeles County, Black defendants were being charged under the three-strikes law at 13 times the rate of white defendants — a disparity that exceeded even the racial disparities in the underlying felony arrest rate, suggesting that prosecutorial discretion was compounding enforcement-level disparities.^3^

By 2000, more Black men were in California prisons on three-strikes sentences for marijuana offenses than for murder, manslaughter, and rape combined, according to data compiled by the Justice Policy Institute.

How 28 Other States Followed California’s Lead

Twenty-eight states had enacted some form of three-strikes legislation by the mid-1990s. The severity varied considerably. States like Georgia, Montana, and Louisiana adopted laws requiring life sentences on a third felony conviction. Washington State’s 1993 three-strikes law — the first in the country, passed after the murder of Paulina Brock, a nine-year-old Tacoma girl — required three serious violent felonies before triggering a life sentence, a significantly more targeted application than California’s.

The federal version, included in the 1994 crime bill, applied to “serious violent felonies” and required three federal convictions. It was less frequently used than state versions because federal prosecution of non-drug, non-immigration offenses is less common than state prosecution.

Why California Voters Reversed Course in 2012

California voters passed Proposition 36 on November 6, 2012, with 69 percent support, amending the three-strikes law to require that the third strike be a serious or violent felony. By 2017, more than 2,000 people had been resentenced under Proposition 36, with an average sentence reduction of approximately six years, according to Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes Project. The project found that people resentenced under the new law had recidivism rates of approximately 1 percent over three years — considerably lower than the recidivism rate for the California prison population as a whole.^4^

Three-strikes laws were sold as solutions to the problem of the career criminal — the person who had repeatedly offended and whom society had given enough chances. In a narrow set of cases, they arguably served that purpose. But the California version was applied in a way that produced life sentences for theft and drug possession, concentrated those sentences in Black communities, and cost the state tens of billions of dollars in prison spending without producing measurable reductions in crime. Crime rates fell sharply in the 1990s, but they fell in states without three-strikes laws at the same rate they fell in states that had them. Three strikes compounded the racial architecture that mandatory minimums had already built, adding decades to sentences that were already disproportionate. The result fed directly into the mass incarceration system that would take another generation to partially dismantle.

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Sources:

1. Zimring, Franklin, Gordon Hawkins, and Sam Kamin. Punishment and Democracy: Three Strikes and You’re Out in California. Oxford University Press, 2001.
2. RAND Corporation. Three Strikes and You’re Out: Estimated Benefits and Costs of California’s New Mandatory Sentencing Law. RAND, 1996.
3. Mauer, Marc. Race to Incarcerate. The New Press, 1999.
4. Justice Policy Institute. Striking Out: The Failure of California’s Three Strikes and You’re Out Law. Justice Policy Institute, 1999.
5. Stanford Law School Three Strikes Project. Proposition 36: Three Years Later. Stanford Law School, 2015.