3 strikes

7 Pages 1753 Words

ng criminals to excessive prison terms, and costing society entirely too much money (Walker, 1998). The three strikes law in California stipulates that your first two “strikes” are acquired when you commit two serious or violent felonies. However the third strike can be any type of felony, violent or nonviolent (Schafer, 1999). For this reason, more and more criminals are being put away, especially in California, for third strikes that are nonviolent and relatively small crimes and overcrowding our prisons at a fast rate. In 1996, males under the age of twenty-five accounted for forty-five percent of the individuals arrested for index crimes (Schafer, 1999). This raises questions for skeptics of three strikes laws. Why incarcerate offenders for life when their criminal tendencies statistically drop after a certain age? These opponents assert that three strikes laws subject offenders to over-incarceration. This leads to the next issue concerning money. Burr states in his study comparing the impact of the three strikes law in California to the impact in Canada that “over-incarceration does not serve the interest of justice or the interests of the taxpayer” (2000: 5). Walker estimates that if California were to implement the new law to the full ex...