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Three Strikes Legislation I have done a lot of thinking about this paper and tried to come up if I am in favor or not of the three strikes legislation. Once I started
Three Strikes The Washington State Three-Strikes Law It is difficult to determine whether the three-strikes law in Washington is an effective form of legislation.
three strikes law Today there is a growing awareness of repeat offenders among society in reference to crime. Starting around 1980 there was noticeable increase
California's Proposition 184: Three Strikes And You're Out California's Proposition 184: Three Strikes and You're Out Last year in California voters approved a controversial
in prison, we have increased our inmate population by a million people in the last four years (Three Strikes Rule, 2006). Under this legislation, the defendant would
Submitted by kelleyj46574 on March 5, 2007
Category: Social Issues
Words: 956 | Pages: 4
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I have done a lot of thinking about this paper and tried to come up if I am in favor or not of the three strikes legislation. Once I started my research and found out about California's laws, I was very much in favor of the legislation. My paper is going to argue the "in favor" side of the three strikes legislation.
California's "Three strikes and you're out" legislation has been called "the largest penal experiment in American history." California's three strikes law is the harshest recidivism statute in the country and it increases punishments sharply and discontinuously at the 3rd strike (Zimring, Hawkins and Kamin 2001). California's three strikes law took effect in March of 1994. A "strike" is a conviction for a serious or violent felony as these are laid out in the California Penal Code, examples of strikes include murder, rape, robbery, attempted murder, assault with intent to rape or rob, any felony resulting in bodily harm, arson, kidnapping, grand theft with firearm, drug sales to minors, and any felony with a deadly weapon.
A criminal with one strike who is convicted of any subsequent felony faces an automatic doubling of the sentence length on that conviction and can't be released prior to serving at least 80% of the sentence length. A criminal with two strikes who is convicted of any subsequent felony faces a prison sentence of 25 year to life and can't be released prior to serving at least 80% of the 25-year term. Although other states have passed similar sounding laws, the California law is widely considered to be the most severe. (Zimring, Hawkins and Kamin 2001, Shepard 2002).
Three strikes prisoners must serve at least a twenty year sentence before they are even eligible for parole and some will never be released. Assume a 22 year old or 264 month average sentence. The average prisoner sentenced under two-strikes serves 43 months (Brown and Jolivette 2005), if we take that as the counterfactual sentencing scheme but...
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