James Fox

THREE STRIKES It seems only yesterday, I wrote the following:

Los Angeles (AP) - "Many judges are objecting to California's "three strikes" law, saying they have lost their flexibility to adjudicate cases individually." - "Under the law, the judges have no ability to tailor the sentence to make it appropriate to the defendant and to the crime

These Bleeding-heart, liberal judges don't seem to realize that they are the root cause of our needing such a law. The ugly gray world that they exist in, is killing us.

The people who live their lives in the black and white world of being robbed, raped, or shot; only know at the end of the day, yes we did or no we didn't, get robbed, raped or shot.

When we finally get smart enough to punish criminals for breaking the law, and punish each criminal equally under that law. Only then will our streets be restored to some semblance of order.

Well Folks, Much as I hate to admit it, I was sorta wrong. I'm hardly ever wrong, but in this case, I really didn't look far enough into the future, and I didn't sufficiently analyze the law itself. Rigid compliance in sentencing has resulted in: every year, more people being arrested than the entire combined populations of our 13 least populated states.

America incarcerates five times as many people per capita as Canada and seven times as many as most European democracies.

America spends approximately 100 billion dollars a year on the criminal justice system, up from 12 billion in 1972. These are Bureau of Justice statistics.

Many politicians, and I also, hailed the three-strikes laws as the ultimate get-tough-on-crime measure, but it now is the main cause contributing to prison overcrowding. If a defendant is convicted of a third felony, judges in three-strikes states are required to issue a 25-year plus sentence, even if the third felony was a minor non-violent offense such as shoplifting.

Three-strikes laws are not effective crime prevention measures, they are unnecessarily harsh sentencing guidelines that punish harmless petty criminals and overcrowd our prisons. The cost in California to house one adult prisoner is $25,607 per year. The taxpayers of the State of California will pay this cost. Considering that the average offender is youthful, with the age range of 25 to 37, when these folks get 25 years to life, this will cost the California citizens $640,000 over the period of 25 years in housing alone!

In addition, the incarceration of non-violent drug-using offenders, which the three-strike rule also applies, costs a minimum of $25,607 per year (and as much as $50,000). The most comprehensive court mandated drug treatment program costs an average of $3,000 annually per offender. The California Drug and Alcohol Treatment Assessment (CALDATA) estimated a cost of less than $8 per day for outpatient treatment, which compares with estimates of $50 to $70 per day associated with jail time. The capital costs to build a prison cell is $80-$90,000 per unit .

This lock-em-up trend is costing taxpayers plenty. The annual prison budget for California is $4.8 billion, with 66.5 percent of it spent on salaries. It costs more than $194 million a year just to feed the inmates. And by itself, the $372 million a year spent for inmates' medical and mental health is more than 36 other states allocate for their entire prison systems.