Californians' preoccupation with crime as a political issue reached its apogee in 1994 when the Legislature - dramatically reversing an earlier position - passed the "three-strikes-and-you're-out" law that sharply increased penalties for repeat offenders, and voters re-enacted it themselves later that year.
A liberal Legislature had rejected the "three strikes" law despite the pleas of Fresno photographer Mike Reynolds, whose daughter had been murdered by a repeat felon. However, in late 1993, the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas in Petaluma by a particularly loathsome recent parolee reignited the issue, and panicky lawmakers did an abrupt about-face.
The omnipotent speaker of the state Assembly, Willie Brown, opposed the measure but as the Klaas case erupted, he acknowledged the political firestorm, describing his colleagues as "a group of people of zero courage" and adding, "Not even Willie Brown, regardless of his persuasive powers, could turn that around or alter that course. I would be shouting in the wind."
There were other agendas in play, of course. Then-Gov. Pete Wilson was facing a tough re-election in 1994 and was trumpeting his tough-on-crime credentials as he faced state Treasurer Kathleen Brown, who had opposed capital punishment. And the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the powerful union that represents prison employees, had provided seed money for the "three strikes" initiative. Locking more felons behind bars would, of course, require more prison cells and more dues-paying unions members to guard them.
"Three strikes" has been California 's law for a decade, surviving several judicial challenges and a major effort last year to persuade voters to soften its provisions, financed by a wealthy man whose son was serving an enhanced prison term. When it appeared that the 2004 measure (Proposition 66) might pass, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger intervened with a last-minute campaign to persuade voters to reject it.
Stripped of its politics, has "three strikes" made Californians safer from predatory criminals as Reynolds and other advocates said it would, or has it filled the prisons with relatively harmless minor criminals at great cost to taxpayers, as the naysayers still contend? A new study by the Legislature's budget analyst acknowledges that there are no definitive answers.
It's an arithmetic certainty that "three strikes" has prevented at least some crimes, and perhaps some violent crimes, that otherwise would have been committed. A quarter of the state's prison inmates are serving enhanced terms because of the law, and some of them certainly would have committed crimes were they not behind bars. But it's impossible to pinpoint the law's precise effect, as the legislative analyst's overview points out, because other factors were also in play.
The study notes that the state's crime rate had declined by 10 percent in the three years prior to "three strikes" enactment and has continued to drop since, with a few blips. But similar declines have been charted in the nation as a whole, and in California the declines have been roughly the same in counties where "three strikes" is often applied and in those where prosecutors and judges use it sparingly.
In conservative Kern County , there are 1,518 "three strikes" sentencings for every 100,000 adult felony arrests, but in liberal San Francisco , at the other end of the scale, it's just 113 per 100,000. Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation with the application of the law and local voting on last year's Proposition 66.
If proponents' claims about its positive effects are difficult to prove, the claims of its opponents that "three strikes" would flood the prisons are equally shaky. Although a quarter of the 160,000 or so current inmates have "three strikes" enhancements, that proportion appears to have stabilized and inmate population growth has been far less than the opponents claimed it would be.
Overall, the legislative analyst estimates that keeping "strikers" behind bars is costing taxpayers about a half-billion extra dollars a year. But of course we cannot measure how much property loss or human grief that half-billion dollars has prevented, so the debate continues.