The U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld a lower court ruling in a 5-4 decision, mandating that California release nearly 33,000 prisoners in the next two years to reduce its prison population. Some have looked at this ruling as a means to attack California's "three-strikes" law.
Under the law, a third felony conviction requires a sentence of 25 years to life if the two prior convictions are serious or violent. The California law, however, does not require the third conviction to be either serious or violent, so individuals with relatively minor felony convictions, such as theft, have received unduly harsh sentences.
Of note, a quarter of the prison population was incarcerated under the three-strikes law, as either second or third offenders, at the end of 2010. Proponents of the law claim that California's prison overcrowding problem has little correlation to the three-strikes law, but is due more to the state's high recidivism rate than the multiple offenders serving time.
Those who support the law, which includes most of the California District Attorney Offices, also point out that the law now gives district attorneys and judges discretion as to when to use the three-strikes law, and thus defendants with two prior convictions are no longer automatically herded through the system as third-strikers.
Those who oppose the three-strikes law include Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, who believes the law needs to be changed so that both the two prior offenses and the current third offense would need to be serious or violent to apply the three-strikes law, and that those who are already incarcerated under the three-strikes law, who were convicted of minor third offenses, should be allowed a method to file for release.
Some also support doing away with the law completely, noting that cities such as New York that do not have a three-strikes law have somehow still managed to reduce their crime much more effectively than California.
With the Unites States Supreme Court ordering a great number of prisoners released from the California prisons, the state will be forced to come up with some way in which to decide who gets released and who doesn't. Citing the ineffectiveness in the three-strikes law in achieving its purported goal-to reduce recidivism-and the fact that many of those incarcerated as third-strikers are not necessarily the most dangerous criminals California needs to keep locked up, the time may now be ripe for California to revamp or completely do away with its three-strikes law.
