Our goal is not to eliminate the law but to make it balanced and fair,” says CAVC vice-chair Jim Benson, a former baseball-card-and-collectibles shop owner and onetime state Assembly candidate for Ross Perot’s Reform Party. Benson voted for Three Strikes in 1994, but says he didn’t realize what its real impact would be. “A lot of us thought we were voting for a law targeting violent, heinous criminals like Richard Allen Davis, not someone who steals a loaf of bread from a food pantry.”

With funding from a Sacramento insurance businessman, Benson says the group has already collected nearly enough signatures to guarantee it a spot on the ballot. He’s confident of victory if the measure gets to the voters: A poll commissioned by CAVC and FACTS last year found that nearly two-thirds of those surveyed supported amending Three Strikes so that it would apply only to violent felonies.

Due to budget crises, several states are re-thinking mandatory minimum penalties. They can't afford to keep people locked up so long. In California, Gray Davis was so beholden to the Prison Guards Union, that reform legislation didn't have a chance. With Gov. Schwarzenegger, there's hope:

Schwarzenegger is the first governor in many years who is not beholden to the powerful state prison guards’ union. That union helped bankroll the Three Strikes initiative in the first place, and doled out millions to Governors Wilson and Davis, ensuring that neither man would ever support measures that might reduce the state’s prison population and thereby jeopardize guards’ jobs. But Schwarzenegger didn’t get a dime from them, and so might be open to reforms that they oppose. He has already shown a willingness to look a bit softer on prisoners than hs predecessors; he recently allowed the parole of two aging convicted murderers, something Davis swore he would never allow.

Back to Polly Klass: her family is now outraged at the law's abuses that have been taken in her name. Her grandfather, Joe Klaas, has taken his displeasure with the three strikes bill to the legislature:

“I want to state up-front,” says Joe Klaas, a man born to the mike and the dramatic gesture, “that the murder, rape and kidnapping of my granddaughter, Polly Klaas, was exploited by this three-strikes bill — a bill which didn’t stand a chance in hell of passing, before Polly’s killing.”...

The insanity, the injustice of this “Taliban-type” law was an affront not only to 12-year-old Polly’s memory, but to the entire Klaas family. Polly had been used, they’d all been used, to get this “God-awful, unjust bill” passed. “Unjust, God-awful,” that’s exactly what he felt, and why he’d climbed into his silver ’85 Buick Regal that morning and driven the 200 miles from Carmel to speak at this hearing and to try and have the law changed.

“As a former prisoner . . . of the Nazis . . . I can say that taking 25 years of somebody’s life for committing a nonviolent crime is violence almost on the level with murder.”