Three-strikes laws

SIGNIFICANCE: Three-strikes laws are largely symbolic in most of the United States, but in California they helped to swell the prison population and escalated the critical problems of prison overcrowding and fiscal crisis.

As the politically motivated get-tough-on-crime campaigns against crime and drugs escalated during the 1980s, US government policymakers moved to adapt the baseball concept of “three strikes and you’re out” to the sentencing of repeat offenders, and multiple states and the federal government rushed to create politically popular mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

The goal behind these laws was to punish serious and violent repeat offenders with prison sentences as long as from twenty-five years to life, while reducing victimization and improving community safety through the casting out and incapacitating of the worst criminals. Despite the initial popularity of the concept of three-strikes laws, they have been little used in most states. However, one state, California, pursued the concept with such vigor that it became an integral part of the state’s corrections and fiscal landscape, leading to a massive prison population.

The United States

In 1993, voters in the state of Washington responded to a particularly heinous violent sexual crime by a recidivist parolee by approving an initiative that mandated life in prison without the possibility of parole for persons convicted of committing serious offenses such as murder, rape, and robbery a third time. Within two years, more than twenty-five other states and the federal government approved their own variations of three-strikes laws. While there was some variation in the crimes covered by these new laws, the principles of “three strikes” and long mandatory sentences adopted in Washington State were followed in virtually all the new laws.

Over the next decade, state legislatures and court systems showed appropriate restraint by sentencing only a few thousand criminals under three-strikes laws throughout the entire nation. For example, between 1993 and 2004, the state of Washington sentenced fewer than two hundred criminals under its three-strikes laws. Generally, the original intent of the law was upheld, as most of the criminals sentenced under these laws were violent robbers, sex offenders, murderers, and individuals convicted of serious assaults.

California

Meanwhile, by 1994, both the legislature and voters of California had adopted three-strikes laws. California’s laws included a unique feature: the provision of a second-strike enhancement that doubled sentences, as well as the ability of prosecutors to file third-strike charges on nonviolent and nonserious felony offenses, many of which would ordinarily have been treated as misdemeanors. For example, shoplifting offenses could be prosecuted as petty theft if the offenders had prior convictions.

California’s approach was controversial and raised important issues relating to the Eighth Amendment and its cruel and unusual punishment clause and the principle of proportionality. In the 2003 landmark companion cases of Lockyer v. Andrade and Ewing v. California, the US Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 in favor of allowing California to set the sentencing laws approved by its voters.

The most striking result of California’s three-strikes law was a large increase in the state’s prison population. A 2022 report from the California Policy Lab found that the law had lengthened the prison terms of more than 60,000 inmates since 2015. An estimated 36 percent of California’s prison population were serving longer sentences because of the three-strikes laws. The large number of prisoners placed unprecedented strains on the state’s budget. The average cost of housing an inmate in California was $127,800 per year as of 2025, according to the California Legislature.

The 1990s found California, like the rest of the nation, experiencing significant crime reductions. Experts believe that reductions in crime were more likely to be due to the robust economy of that period, the increased availability of jobs, the maturation of community policing, and other criminal justice and corrections systems improvements rather than to the advent of three-strikes laws. Support for this observation can be found in the fact that the national reduction in crime occurred fairly evenly throughout the nation, including the one-half of the states that had no three-strikes laws.

In November 2004, Californians voted on an initiative that would have eased the state’s three-strikes law by allowing judges to impose milder prison sentences on nonviolent offenders. That measure failed to pass. In 2012, California voters approved Proposition 36, which significantly amended the state's three-strikes law: the requirements for sentencing a defendant as a third-strike offender were changed to twenty-five years to life by requiring the new felony to be a serious or violent felony and the addition of a means by which defendants currently serving a third-strike sentence could petition the court for a reduction of their term.

Bibliography

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Clark, John Austin, James Henry, and D. Alan Henry. “Three Strikes and You’re Out”: A Review of State Legislation. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, 1997. Print.

Couzens, J. Richard, and Tricia A. Bigelow. "The Amendment of the Three Strikes Sentencing Law." California Courts. Judicial Council of California, 17 May 20246, www.courts.ca.gov/documents/Three-Strikes-Amendment-Couzens-Bigelow.pdf. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025.

Ehlers, Scott, Vincent Schiraldi, and Jason Ziedenberg. Still Striking Out: Ten Years of California’s Three Strikes. Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute, 2004. Print.

"How Much Does It Cost to Incarcerate a Person?" Legislative Analyst's Office, The California Legislature's Nonpartisan Fiscal and Policy Adviser, Sept. 2025, www.lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025.

Hwang, Kristen, and Nigel Duara. "As California Closes Prisons, the Cost of Locking Someone Up Hits New Record at $132,860." Cal Matters, 23 Jan. 2024, calmatters.org/justice/2024/01/california-prison-cost-per-inmate/. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025.

LaCourse, R. David, Jr. Three Strikes in Review. Seattle: Washington Policy Center, 1997. Print.

"Report Provides In-Depth Look at Three-Strikes Law in California." Berkeley Public Policy, 1 Sept. 2022, gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/news/recent-news/report-provides-in-depth-look-at-three-strikes-law-in-california?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025.

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