TEN LOSING SEASONS
A decade after the passage of California's Three Strikes law, even some of the people who helped pas
When opponents of the state's Three Strikes law need a poster child for their cause, they point to Shane Reams. The 35-year-old was convicted in 1996 of being a lookout on a drug deal involving an undercover cop. He languishes in prison today as his 13-year-old son hits the teen doldrums without a father and afraid to visit him in prison. The boy believes that if he goes in he, too, might never come out.
"The Shane Reams story really hit me because he's someone I could relate to," says author and journalist Joe Dominick. "His first two strikes were for residential burglaries of unoccupied dwellings. It's a real violation, but it's not the same as other, more serious crimes. His last strike was for being the alleged lookout for the $20 sale of rock cocaine to an undercover cop. The officer testified that Reams turned his head left and right twice and that was proof that he was the lookout. The guy actually selling the drugs got three years."
Next week, Dominick is releasing a book, Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America's Golden State, which tells the sagas of three strikers such as Reams, and is quite critical of the legislation's effects. And, on the heels of the tenth anniversary of Three Strikes, a group called Citizens Against Violent Crime (CAVC) is collecting signatures for a November ballot initiative, "Amend Three Strikes," that would update the law so it would apply only to "violent and/or serious felonies" and increase third-strike terms for sex crimes against children.
Joe Klaas, grandfather of Polly Klaas, whose kidnapping and murder was the impetus for the passage of Three Strikes, is chairman of CAVC. He has said his family is dismayed by the number of third strikers - more than 60 percent - serving 25 years to life in prison for nonviolent third-strike convictions. A report released last week by the left-leaning Justice Policy Institute concludes the law has had little effect on crime, has cost the state $8 billion in extra prison costs, and disproportionately targets minorities. (Latinos, it says, are convicted for second and third strikes at a rate 78 percent higher than whites.)
Opponents of Three Strikes are using the developments to rally the public, hoping voters will agree the law is imprisoning many who could be rehabilitated.
"The bottom line is, I was a tough-love parent," says Sue Reams, mother of Shane. "In 1990, I got my son to turn himself in for burglarizing me and my neighbors. I drove him to the police station and he got prison time. He learned more about drugs and gangs and crime. Then I voted for the Three Strikes law. I sacrificed my son for 25 to life. I can't imagine someone spending 25 to life for watching a drug sale, especially in a state where we're going broke and where white-collar crime seems to pay. I could have sent him to Harvard for what it's costing the state to keep him in there."
According to the Justice Policy Institute's (JPI) report, "Still Striking Out," the additional prison time of Three Strikes cost the state $8.1 billion over the last 10 years and $4.7 billion of that was used for "longer prison terms for nonviolent offenses." The study also found that the third-strike incarceration rate for African Americans is 12 times higher than that for whites (Shane Reams is half Polynesian, is often mistaken by guards as being black, and is housed with blacks, his mother says). The average third-striker, according to the report, has at least one child, like Reams. And the chances for his 13-year-old boy seem grim. "Each of 46,700 children with a striker parent will spend an average of 5.8 years longer away from their parent under Three Strikes as compared to before Three Strikes passed," states JPI's report. According to the California Research Bureau, these children are seriously at risk for "delinquency and ... intergenerational incarceration."
Dominick says the tough-on-crime movement has its roots in the 1960s, when state conservatives used the issue to paint Democrats as softies. The ploy worked and by the early '90s, Democrats became allied with law enforcement. An early '90s crime wave fueled by economic doldrums (the closure of aerospace manufacturing firms and military bases), and perhaps inspired by the lawlessness of the L.A. riots, was at full crest. A backlash ensued. It was the age of Proposition 187, which would have denied education and public services to undocumented migrants. Fervor against the poor and people of color was at a high, and, in 1994, the legislature passed Three Strikes with the support of people like Joe Klaas.
"In the early '90s, the legislature passed more than a 1,000 get-tough-on-crime laws," says Dominick. "It goes back to the '60s and the perception that liberals were coddling criminals. There was some truth to that. Democrats tried to recover from that image. That's why President Clinton was so tough on crime. It was tough here in California for Democratic politicians, so the Democrats really just caved on this bill."
The legislation was spearheaded by Mike Reynolds, a Fresno wedding photographer whose daughter was tragically killed by two crackheads for her purse in 1992.
"Fresno was undergoing a lot of street crime," Dominick says. "They got then-state Assemblyman Bill Jones to carry the bill." (Jones is now the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate.)
"The bill got nowhere until Polly Klaas was kidnapped and killed," Dominick says. "That got it a tremendous amount of publicity. People called her 'America's Child.' That was the whirlwind that pushed the Three Strikes bill through the legislature without one word changed. They literally wrote it on Reynolds' backyard picnic table in Fresno."
Proponents of the law say it has been largely responsible for the state's 10-year decline in crime. "Violent crime in California has dropped by nearly half from when the law was passed in 1994," Jones said in a statement. "Three Strikes works."
Charles Hobson, an attorney with the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, argues the law is responsible for incalculable quality of life improvements in the state. "It has become a metaphor," he says. "Its deterrent effect is powerful."
"We've had a net export of parolees from the state," Hobson says. "You get anecdotal evidence that these people are leaving because of the Three Strikes law."
But with a state economy starting to shows signs of improving, crime was already beginning its historic, decade-long decline in the latter half of '94, before the first third-strike sentences were handed down. JPI's report concludes that, in the go-go '90s, "non-Three Strikes states had a larger average drop in violent crime" and "non-Three Strikes states had a lower average violent crime rate in 2002 than Three Strikes states."
The feelings of people like Hobson will be pitted against those of people like Jim Benson, vice chairman of CAVC, if "Amend Three Strikes" makes the November ballot. So far, CAVC reports it has about half the signatures it needs to qualify for the slate.
"I think people will vote for it because it's tough on crime and it's smart with taxpayer dollars," Benson says. "People are ready to say we want a Three Strikes law that targets violent repeat offenders, but we don't want our tax money spent on jailing people who could be in rehabilitation or job training. A life sentence for stealing a loaf of bread isn't justice no matter how you slice it."
Published: 03/11/2004
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