Abstract:
While habitual felon legislation is nothing new, throughout the last twenty years it has assumed great penological significance. Following Washington State’s 1993 legislation and California’s 1994 initiative, between 1994 and 2006, half of the states in the USA enacted three strikes laws. California’s law, responsible for the majority of all U.S. convictions, is more draconian than most laws: it established broad classes of strike-eligible crimes, created robust second-strike provisions, and authorized the stacking of third sentences; it counted any felony as third strikes; restricted good-time credit; and prohibited probation, suspended sentences, or diversion. While a number of legal challenges were lodged against California’s three strikes law, and while a number of infamous convictions resulted, state and federal courts upheld the constitutionality of the legislation. While criminological research on the deterrent qualities of three strikes is equivocal, three strikes legislation may have contributed to California’s runaway prison crowding. This crowding is serious enough that in 2011, in Brown v. Plata (09-1233), the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed an order to reduce California’s prison population by 40,000 persons. In light of California’s experience with three strikes, it may seem bizarre that other jurisdictions would enact similar mandatory sentencing policies, but in 1997, the United Kingdom and Australia’s Northern Territory did just that, and in 2010, New Zealand passed three strikes legislation in its Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill 2010, as well. New Zealand has had only two years of experience with its three strikes law, and little official data is available, but this paper outlines the available data and compares it to sentencing data from other jurisdictions.