Thursday, December 12, 2013
3 strikes only works in baseball
But many parts of the US judicial system are burdened by "3 Strikes" laws that end up putting repeat offenders in prison for life, many of them for non-violent crimes against property.
Nearly 160,000 people are serving life sentences in America’s prisons, according to a recent report by the Sentencing Project (PDF), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for criminal-justice reform. Thirty-one percent of those people, like Bartley, won’t ever go before a parole board. A separate study by the American Civil Liberties Union found that nearly 4,000 prisoners in the U.S. will serve life in prison for nonviolent offenses.And all these lifers need the full care and control of a prison for the rest of their days. And the cost is doubled or tripled if the state had abdicated their prisons to private companies. It's time to change a law that doesn't work.
As of this year, the 20th anniversary of Washington becoming the first state to pass a three-strikes law, the state’s prisons are flooded with lifers. Washington is one of seven states where more than 15 percent of the entire prison population is serving a life sentence. It’s also home to the second-largest population of prisoners serving life without parole for non-homicide crimes — neighboring Idaho is No. 1. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of Washington’s prisoners who are serving life without parole were sentenced under three strikes, according to the state’s Department of Corrections.
These numbers are a big problem, especially given statistics showing that violent crime has been on a steady decline in the past two decades, said Ashley Nellis, who wrote the Sentencing Project report. Crime isn’t waning, she said, because of all the people behind bars for life.
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