Research finds California three-strikes law fails to reduce violent crime
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By Madison Ruppert Editor of End the Lie [caption id="attachment_39479" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Sociologist Robert Nash Parker (Image credit: University of California, Riverside)"] [/caption] Robert Nash Parker, a sociologist and the director of the Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies at the University of California, Riverside, has found that the declining crime rates in California and around the United States are linked to a decline in alcohol consumption, not the so-called “tough-on-crime” policies like three-strikes laws. Worst of all, Parker found that these policies only serve to compound the massive financial problems in California by increasing the already ludicrously bloated prison population. Physorg.com characterizes Parker as a scholar who “is known internationally for groundbreaking research on the relationship between alcohol policies and crime” and his newest research will appear in the spring issue of the California Journal of Politics and Policy. His findings will be detailed in a piece he dubbed “Worse Policy After Bad: How and Why California’s ‘Three Strikes’ is a Complete Failure as Crime and Economic Policy , and What to Do About Either.” Three-strikes laws first came into being around 1994 and were billed as an effort to curb recidivism, or more colloquially, to stop so-called “career criminals.” When previous offenders have been convicted a third time, they can be sentenced for 25 years to life, even if that third offense is a nonviolent crime like shoplifting. One statistic regularly cited by proponents of such legislation is the 20-year decline of crime rates in California. Indeed, over the past two decades the crime rate has been reduced by half, although the fatal flaw in pointing to this statistic is that the decline began two years before the three-strikes laws came into play. Parker highlights this in saying, “Political leaders, activists, law enforcement personnel, and elected officials in California believe the state’s three-strikes law is the cause of this magnificent decline in violence. That is not the case. Three-strikes has had nothing whatsoever to do with the drop in violent crime.” Parker came to his conclusions by analyzing crime data from across the United States. In the course of his analysis so he discovered that crime in California has declined at rates comparable to states both with three-strikes laws in place and those without. “This suggests that whatever is driving the trend in violent crime over the last 46 years in these states it is not three-strikes policy,” Parker stated. Interestingly, the rate of imprisonment in states with three-strikes legislation is not always the same. Indeed, a review of three-strikes legislation by the National Institute of Justice found that California imprisoned 300 times the inmates as Washington state, even though California’s population is only around 5.5 times that of Washington. Washington put their three-strikes law into place about the same time as California and Parker notes that they experienced about the same drop in crime, even with radically different rates of incarceration. “Differences between California’s three-strikes law and those of Washington and other states explains this difference,” Parker said. “California increased its prison population significantly yet obtained roughly the same crime drop at the same time as states that had similar laws, but without their impact, as well as that obtained by states that did not pass any laws aimed at reducing violence through [a] vast increase in the prison population,” he added. Parker’s previous research dealing with the correlations between alcohol consumption and crime found some other interesting connections. He discovered that nationwide homicide rates have a strong correlation with both alcohol consumption and rates of unemployment. Beginning with the 1930s, Parker found that a spike in murder rates was preceded by an increase in alcohol consumption by one to two years. Similarly, he noticed that homicide rates decreased one to two years after a decrease in alcohol consumption. Alcohol consumption in the United States rose to its highest point back in 1982, after which it has declined steadily and considerably. Parker’s research brings one to the unavoidable conclusion that three-strikes legislation cannot be justified based on its impact on crime. “There is no justification for continuing three-strikes from a violence-prevention point of view,” Parker states. “My analysis suggests that alcohol policy designed to reduce overall consumption in California may be more effective at reducing violence than three-strikes or other criminal justice policy initiatives.” However, since three-strikes legislation leads to more people being put in prison – and thus greater profits for the private prison industry – I doubt that there will be a powerful push to actually introduce meaningful legislation. While the budget situation in California is obviously far from simple, Parker notes that the three-strikes law has made the problem significantly worse by making the prison system consume a constantly growing and unsustainably large portion of the general budget on a yearly basis. This is evidenced by looking at the state’s spending in 1985 compared to 2010. In 1985, higher education spending made up 11 percent of the general budget fund and prison funding was around 4 percent. Then in 2010, higher education funding dropped to less than 6 percent of the total state spending and prisons ate up around 10 percent. The future prison costs in California are highly variable, depending a great deal on how the state chooses to respond to the United State Supreme Court’s decision last year aimed at fighting overcrowded prisons. The California state auditor has estimated that future costs attributable to sentencing caused by three-strikes laws range from $19 billion to $23 billion per year or even more depending on the state’s response to the Supreme Court’s order. In response to the decision, the state legislature has reportedly planned on diverting most of the inmates to county jails, with the states picking up the bill, to avoid possibly releasing 40,000 inmates. The auditor’s report revealed that if all of the inmates who had been sentenced under three-strikes legislation were immediately released, the state of California and counties would save $1.3 billion in prison spending right away. This number would likely even go up in coming years and Parker is an advocate of releasing these inmates. “If three strikes has resulted in all this incarceration and expense, yet has little to do with controlling crime, why not release these inmates?” Parker said. “The state of California should give up its addiction to the all-you-can eat buffet of imprisonment, the result of which has been to undermine the financial health of the state, weaken the quality of education at all levels, and force California to make draconian cuts in programs that enhance and benefit the lives of its residents in exchange for a mistaken idea that public safety was the result,” he said. “The bottom line result of three-strikes has been an almost unbearable financial burden that looms in the future despite current efforts and which will only be resolved when the pipeline of over-punishment is finally shut down,” Parker added. Indeed, this is quite obvious when one looks at the facts which cannot easily be skewed or spun by parties who seek to benefit in one way or another. Yet so long as there is money to be made – and a lot of it I might add – I think there will be a concerted effort to marginalize findings like Parker’s in order to keep the massive funds flowing into the coffers of the private prison industry titans. The American “justice” system is far from just as evidenced by the fact that police can brutally beat elderly men with dementia and only get a written reprimand as a result , while average people can be put in prison for 25 years to life for something as minor as stealing golf clubs . The United States has become a society where we criminalize children at the earliest age possible and thus we create a criminal culture which leads to the incarceration rate