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I can only barely make out the reasoning for opposition to them. Every time I hear someone complaining about them and they provide an example, it's that the third felony was supposedly too minor to warrant harsh punishment, and I find that I'm just baffled by the reasoning here. There was a story floating around on Twitter recently where someone driving a stolen car recklessly struck another vehicle, killing the innocent driver in the process. During sentencing, he said something to the effect of, "I'm going to jail for life for a car accident?" and that seemed like the perfect encapsulation of the mentality opposition to three strike laws, this sense of grievance that people someone manage to hold after doing everything wrong and fucking with innocent people constantly.
Well, for example, the original CA three strikes law required that a defendant with two or more previous serious or violent felony convictions had to receive a 25-life sentence for any new felony conviction. Any felony could include such crimes as a theft of an item valued at over $400 or possession of more than an ounce of marijuana. Even if you are OK with that, surely you can can imagine why some people might not be, including a majority of CA voters, who subsequently changed the law so that the third offense must be a serious felony.
No, I can’t. First off, nobody forced him to commit those first two crimes. In my preferred system, he wouldn’t have been out and about after the first one, let alone the second, so he shouldn’t even have been in the position to commit that third felony in the first place. Secondly, let’s say you have a guy who has committed two armed carjackings. That’s a guy who, if given the opportunity and enough time, will commit a third armed carjacking. Or some other serious crime. Carjacking is not something that any normal, functional person would ever do to another person even once, let alone twice.
So, do you want to wait until after he has violently carjacked a third person - or, hell, graduated to an even more horrible and traumatizing and destructive crime - or do you want to jump on the chance to get rid of him when he has done something less horrible, and save some poor individual having their life ruined before we can finally say, “Alright, D’Quandre, we’ve given you enough chances to act like a human.”
This is my fundamental issue with progressive/liberal theories of crime: they are utterly allergic to thinking probabilistically. The mainstream consensus in the Western world is so infected with the braindead Christian focus on forgiveness that they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that you can accurately and reliably predict people’s future behavior based on their past behavior. Of course, people can readily accept this idea in nearly every other walk of life, but when it comes to criminal justice suddenly they are determined to pretend that it’s some horrible delusional idea. Minority Report and the idea of “pre-crime” gets thrown around as if it’s some knock-down argument against dealing with very obviously dangerous and impossible-to-live-around individuals before they are able to ruin even more lives than they already have.
Me personally? If you’ve already committed a serious violent felony, done your time in prison for it, and then you so much as jaywalk, that’s society’s perfect chance to execute you and I won’t miss you one bit.
Huh? Evangelicals support harsher punishments overall
That’s because Evangelicals like Christians in general believe in forgiveness for those who accept their faith and offer sincere repentance. The progressive frame instead views all wrongs as caused by structural issues in society. Thus absolving all sins (except those that reinforce the structural issues like racism, etc.). These people were failed by society and therefore deserve as many chances as it takes; as long, they aren’t part of the oppressor class.
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christianity as it was originally intended and christianity as was traditionally understood in societies since shortly after becoming the state religion of the roman empire are two very different things. you can't govern a society around a religion that is based around the idea that the world is ending soon, hence the corruption was inevitable.
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The problem with that of course is the incentives it creates. If a tiny crime will get you executed, abd people commit tiny crimes all the time, then why reform? Why even try?
Its already tough for ex cons to get jobs and go straight. If you're going to follow your idea then don't even let them out in the first place. Just take rehabilitation off the table entirely. But i don't think there is the appetite for that.
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In this particular case, is it not the opposite? Individuals generally do indeed age out of violent crime, so treating all third time offenders as likely to be a threat, regardless of their current crime, does not seem to me to be thinking probablistically at all. At the very least, it is not a matter of not thinking probabilistically, but rather where to draw re what level of probability is sufficient.
Again, how accurately? Esp without taking into account other predictors of future behavior, such as age, the precise nature of the previous and current crime, etc?
Again, the point is that the original iteration of the law gave 25-life sentences to people who were not very obviously dangerous.
I understand that your personal opinion is to err on the side of public safety versus erring on the side of individual liberty. But can you really not understand why some people might disagree and weigh those interests differently?
Do you have any evidence that a significant portion of the people being imprisoned as a result of three-strikes laws had committed only three totally innocuous offenses? (Keep in mind that I do not consider drug possession an innocuous offense.) I’m not asking as a gotcha: I’m open to the possibility that this was happening more often than I assume.
Please note that I didn't say they were innocuous.
I don't know the numbers, but why is that relevant? Surely the numbers were higher under the original version than in the amended version. And, after all, we are not discussing the merits of the law, but rather whether some might weigh the competing interests differently than you do. That is the explanation for the conundrum that you put forth in your original post.
Edit: I just found this data
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But having over an ounce of marijuana is.
Three strike laws are not always limited to serious violent felonies.
Dude… how hard is it not to commit crimes? I’m dead serious. I’m in my early thirties and have never gotten so much as a traffic ticket!
If you're so confident that it is hard to commit crimes, I have a proposal for you that will allow you to demonstrate the correctness of your position, and it'll only take a few days. We'll make a recording of your entire day - every action taken, every little thing you do or say etc, and then hand it over to a veteran prosecutor, who will go over the footage and make sure you didn't actually commit any crimes. Do you think you would have a clean bill at the end of a typical day?
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you dont understand why people commit crimes. the reason is that they are chasing status and being a successful criminal gives them more status in the eyes of their communities than does working at some minimum wage job for their entire life. you can't really blame them for choosing the criminal route, as they are just trying to make the best of their lives in an inherently unfair society, why should they respect the rules of a society that is set up such that they fail and you succeed? now of course im not saying you are wrong for supporting their elimination, but that you dont understand what motivates them.
Source?
wealth inequality is probably the biggest factor, and society is set up so that certain people can not make as much money as they want because of lack of intelligence, disinterest in the available options for highly compensated work, mental illness, etc. even though criminality pays less than working as a menial laborer on average, a successful criminal is more attractive in the eyes of some women being seen as a 'bad boy', so higher status where it matters, than a law abiding drudger.
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Going from "serious violent felony" to "not so much as a traffic ticket" is a really big moving of goalposts.
But that’s my point - people seem to be acting like criminals are getting tripped up by these three-strike rules almost by accident, but I’m pointing out that it’s extremely easy for most people not to end up on the wrong side of the law even in far more minor ways, let alone more serious crimes. It really seems like someone would have to go pretty far out of his way to do stuff bad enough to fall afoul of three-strikes laws, barring a series of very unfortunate and atypical events.
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Yeah. Normal productive people don’t find themselves in three situations where even one is BS.
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