Prison Debate Continues: Researcher Finds No Link Between Three Strikes and Violent Crime Rate

Dan Walters in his column this morning writes, “While liberal critics of the state’s criminal justice system hailed it as a long overdue wake-up call for reform, conservatives raised the specter of felonious hordes being released to prey upon the public.”

He adds that while supporters of tougher prison policies point toward these sentencing laws as the cause of the steady drop in the crime rate, researchers like Robert Nash Parker, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, disagree.

Writes Mr. Walters, “As the Supreme Court was issuing its ruling and Harris was announcing a decline in violent crime, Parker was circulating his new study contending that three-strikes and other sentencing laws had virtually nothing to do with the state’s decreasing violent crime rate.”

Citing “logic, data and research,” Professor Parker contends that “all these uniformly show little or no impact of three strikes policy on violent crime rates in California and elsewhere.”

According to Dan Walters, “He compared historic crime patterns in California and other states with similar laws to those without such laws and found they ‘show little difference in … pattern of violent crime.’ “

Mr. Walters adds, “Parker cites other studies that attribute crime rate declines to economic and social factors, such as alcohol consumption, rather than policing and sentencing policies and suggests it’s ‘better to use alcohol policy to control violence than three strikes.’ “

“Were California to change its approach to crime and comply with the federal court order to reduce the prison population, he notes, it could save $2.3 billion a year in prison costs,” Mr. Walters notes.

“California needs to stop gorging itself at the all-you-can-eat buffet of imprisonment,” says Professor Parker.

The heart of Professor Parker’s research indicates that the law has cost the state billions of dollars per year.

“It ended up imprisoning a lot of people who had maybe one felony, violent felony, early in their life when they were a kid and had pretty much straightened out,” Professor Parker told KABC TV in Los Angeles last week. “Maybe a few minor offenses after that, but because of the law it captured up this whole population.”

Among other problems with attributing the three strikes law to lower crime rate, is the fact that the drop in crime predates three strikes.

While Professor Parker has called the ruling by the courts, an “impetus for change,” he at the same time argues that “it ignores the elephant in the room—the Three Strikes and You’re Out Dilemma.”

“Until we address the wall of resistance to modifying or repealing the Three-Strikes law and reduce our appetite for incarceration,” he added, “California is simply kicking the can down the road.”

The law takes discretion away from the Judges and toward proescutors.

A report in New American Media argues, “Prosecutors have the greatest discretion; they may decide whether to count certain crimes as strikes when they file their criminal complaint. Critics have charged that this system introduces the worst of both worlds: mandatory sentences for those charged under the law and unequal application of the law.”

The report continues, “Parker warns that Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget crisis driven plan to move inmates convicted of lowlevel and non-violent crimes into the custody of county officials combined with the state’s tough sentencing laws, particularly three strikes recidivism, is a cocktail for failure.

“On one hand you’ve got the Justices ordering inmate reductions. On the other hand you’ve got people serving life terms for minor crimes contributing to the prison overcrowding and causing even further financial strains on the state,” Professor Parker said.

The New American Media goes on to report on a lecture “Worse Policy After Bad: Why and How Three Strikes is a Complete Failure as Crime Policy” at the University of California Center Sacramento May 26.  During that lecture Professor Parker “warned against fear mongering and took direct aim at claims that the state’s tough on crime polities, most notably its three strikes law, is responsible for a 100% crime drop since 1992.”

“These assumptions are patently false and irresponsible,” Professor Parker told the audience. “Research and a logical examination of data on violent crime state by state over the past 50 years conclusively show that this is not the case.”

“A multivariate Vector time series model for California over the last 5 decades shows that the imposition of Three Strikes in 1994 has had no impact on the violent crime rate in the state, but that alcohol consumption and unemployment have important impacts on the rate of violent crime,” said Professor Parker.

As the New American Media reports, “Critics of the law point 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 attributed to the Three Strikes Law.”

Professor Parker, as reported by the New American Media article, “said research shows 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.’ “

If these results are correct, said Professor Parker “the budget of California has suffered from a tremendous burden caused by the excess imprisonment of many nonviolent offenders under the Three Strikes policy.”

“I like to tell my students, California didn’t used to be known for incarcerating its citizens – but then the Soviet Union fell and Apartheid ended in South Africa. We were in bad company then.” Now, says Parker, “We’ve gone from being a ‘laboratory’ for Democratic policies to a poster child for incarceration.”

—David M. Greenwald reporting