by TChris

Happy Anniversary, California. It's been ten years since you enacted one of the nation's toughest "three strikes" laws. Are you comforted to know that your state is so much safer now than it was ten years ago?

With 57 percent of the third strikes being nonviolent offenses, typically drug violations or burglary, the law largely hasn't necessarily targeted the most dangerous criminals. Third strikes are 10 times more likely to be for a drug offense than for second-degree murder. In fact, third-strikers sent to prison on a drug offense outnumber the combined total whose offense was assault, rape and second-degree murder, according to the Justice Policy Institute, a research and public policy group that has been critical of the law.

The institute's 10-year analysis of the law also found African Americans and Latinos were far more likely to be imprisoned than white offenders for the same third-strike crimes.

One quarter of California prisoners are serving life terms under the three-strikes law, at a cost so far of about $8.1 billion. More than half that amount was spent to warehouse offenders whose third strike was not a violent crime.

So the law is expensive, it wastes prison resources on people who don't deserve life sentences, and it seems to be implemented in a racially discriminatory manner. California, is that what you intended?

"We're filling our prisons with people who don't belong there,'' said Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, whose reform attempts have been routinely rebuffed. "You can get less time for second-degree murder than for stealing a six-pack of beer. It's not what the public had in mind.''