Battling statistics are being used -- in New Zealand of all places -- to debate California's Three Strikes Law and whether it has actually reduced the crime rate. Why? Because the small island nation near Australia is considering implementing a Three Strikes Law. While the New Zealand proposal is significantly different from California's Three Strikes Law and those of the 22 other U.S. states that have introduced Three Strikes legislation, it hasn't stopped NZ politicians from spouting California statistics to support their cause.
NZ politician David Garrett's claim that California's "three strikes and you're out" laws have reduced homicide and robbery convictions in California by 50% has opponents crying "foul." The opposition says that a general nationwide decrease in U.S. crime rates that began five years before California adopted its Three Strikes Law makes such statistics suspect.
"Were 'three strikes' the cause of a significant part of the decline, the rate of decline should have increased after its passage," said Kim Workman, Director of Rethinking Crime and Punishment in a recent news release on the "Scoop" Politics website. "Instead, the rate of decline remained constant, suggesting that the causes of the decline that were operating prior to the passage of the law continued to be the primary reason for the drop in crime rates."
Workman points out that at the time California adopted its tough Three Strikes Law, New York and Canada, neither of which has a Three Strikes deterrent, enjoyed crime rate declines ballyhooed by Californians as being questionably -- in Workman's view -- attributed to the new Three Strikes Law.
"Even in California, the results were unclear," Workman argues. "Californian counties that aggressively enforced the law had no greater declines in crime than did counties that used it far more sparingly. One study found that crime dropped by 21.3% in the six most lenient 'three strikes' counties, compared to a 12.7% drop in the toughest counties."
Workman contends that the only way to truly gauge the effectiveness of California's Three Strikes Law will be to see what happens to the state's crime rate when offenders incarcerated under the law finish serving their time and are back on the streets. Workman is of the opinion that lengthier prison sentences don't reduce a criminal's taste for crime.
Workman's views certainly make for interesting thinking. More on Friday.
[...] effectiveness of California’s tough Three Strikes Law until you’re blue in the face (see our Feb. 25 post), you can argue that their application sometimes results in punishments too harsh for the crimes [...]