[HPN] PROP E would hurt San Francisco - homeless & poor people especially FWD especially FWD

[Tom Boland]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0002/18/features/features2.html
FWD  Sydney Morning Herald - Friday, February 18, 2000

     TOUGH APPROACH STRIKES OUT IN US

     The only sure result of America's three-strike laws
     has been a leap in the prison population, writes
     Mark Riley.

A black man and his girlfriend were found dead in the garage of their house
in the Californian capital of Sacramento last month. It was a
murder-suicide -- the man had shot his girlfriend and then himself.

It is now known that the man was facing a sentence of life the following
week for possession of less than an ounce of marijuana. It was his third
conviction, and, in California, the home of the three-strikes law, any
third conviction for a serious offender means a mandatory sentence of 25
years to life.

Last week in New Jersey, a man facing a third-strike life sentence under
that state's version of the law jumped to his death from a sixth-storey
balcony.

Back in the California prisons, a man is serving life for snatching a pizza
from a group of schoolchildren when he was drunk. His first two convictions
were on robbery and drug counts. In an adjoining cell, another man is doing
life for stealing a video-recorder. He already had two convictions for
vandalism. He set fire to garbage bins.

The stories of suicide and extreme severity in sentencing associated with
America's three-strikes law are never ending -- like the laws. No
politician wants to be seen as "soft on crime" for changing them,
irrespective of how unjust and inequitable they may be.

The American justice system will pass a significant milestone this week
when its prison population exceeds two million. That makes incarceration
the 32nd most populated state in the Union.

A community backlash at the extreme nature of the laws is only now
beginning to gain some political resonance, although real reform appears a
long way off.

The Californian legislature recently passed a bill calling for a complete
review of the three-strikes law, following the release of two damaging
studies that found it produced sentences of "indiscriminate severity" and
had no deterrent effect.

The reports found the law was simply producing an ever-increasing prison
population and a spiralling burden on the public purse.

But the Democrat Governor, Gray Davis, immediately vetoed the bill, fearing
a voter backlash if he supported a move that could eventually lead to
watered down criminal laws.

The three-strikes law was introduced in California in 1993 by the former
Republican Governor, Pete Wilson. It was based on a law brought in the
previous year in the state of Washington, and was a direct response to the
murder of a young woman, Polly Klaas, by Richard Allen David, who had
already committed two violent crimes. Now 26 US states have different
versions of the law and there is also an over-riding, but little-used,
federal three-strikes law.

However, California is the only state that does not reserve its harshest
penalty for the worst offenders. Anyone found guilty in California of a
felony, generally a more serious crime, faces a doubled sentence for the
next offence, or "second strike", if it is also a felony. The same person
faces a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life for a third crime of any
nature that brings them back before the courts.

A recent report found that almost 50,000 criminals had been sent to jail
under the three-strikes law in its five years of operation. It estimated
that by the end of this year, one quarter of California's 165,000 prison
inmates would be serving sentences issued either for two-strike or
three-strike offences.

Another study found that the law could not claim to have had any effect on
the state's decreasing crime rates. The report by a team from the
University of California at Berkeley, led by law professor Franklin
Zimring, divided the criminal community into two groups - those who faced
the likelihood of a three-strikes sentence if they committed another crime
and those who did not.

It found no evidence that the threat of a long three-strikes sentence had a
deterrent effect.

Noting that there had been a fall in crime in California, Professor Zimring
went on to say "it does not appear that the [three-strikes] law played a
role".

He also noted that blacks accounted for half of all three-strikes
sentences, even though they represented about 12 per cent of the
population. The statistic appeared to support claims by civil rights groups
that the law is applied with greater severity against blacks.

Zimring conceded that a host of social and economic factors led a much
larger proportion of blacks than whites in America to commit property
crimes such as robbery, which are subject to three-strikes sentencing.

"However, it's not that prosecutors are picking on this group, but that the
statute picks on this group," he said.

Polly Klaas's brother, Marc Klaas, was a strong supporter of the
Californian law when it was being promoted by Governor Wilson. But his
opinion changed when he went on a field trip with some of the law's
strongest proponents.

"Something happened that convinced me I had been helping the wrong people,"
he wrote recently in the San Jose Mercury.

"I was in Los Angeles promoting the initiative when, during a ride through
one of the city's disadvantaged neighbourhoods, a member of the
'three-strikes' campaign turned to me and gestured toward a group of young
black men. 'This is how we are going to take care of these people,' he
said. "In seconds, Polly's shining legacy was tarnished, her memory
betrayed. This was the last thing on earth I had intended. I felt I was
headed downhill on a runaway freight train ... and I wanted off that train."

The problem is that the train has politicians at its wheel who are scared
that even slowing down will lead them to a political crash.

END FORWARD

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