Today, Assembly member Spitzer commented on the problem of prison overcrowding in California. A number of stories in a number of papers talked about Judge Karlton’s decision, but missed one very important point. Judge Karlton attributed the overcrowding to "Governor Schwarzenegger’s support of the three strikes law."
Judge Karlton is wrong. Dangerously wrong.
Three Strikes has done more to relieve prison overcrowding than any other single law in recent history. More important, Californians are safer today because of three strikes than they were in the 1970’s when Jerry Brown (our soon to be Attorney General) and his judges (more particularly Rose Bird) were letting bad guys go to relieve prison overcrowding.
In the two years following the passage of the three strikes law, California’s crime rate dropped 45 per cent. Despite the stories of pizza and underwear thieves being sentenced to life, people in the state got it. They figured out that two serious or violent felonies were enough. If a criminal was stupid enough to commit a third felony, that crimimal was likely to continue to be a threat to the safety of law abiding citizens everywhere.
Witness Lawrence Singleton, the fellow who cut off the arms of a young college coed in the late seventies, and got out of prison in 1996, Nobody in California wanted him, so the state shipped him off to Florida. Singleton was the classic three strikes case. He had his two violent felonies under his belt when he left prison. In Florida, his next two crimes were petit thefts, stealing a camera and a baseball cap. In California, he could have received a life sentence after stealing the baseball cap, since a petit theft with a prior conviction for petit theft is a felony under California law. The LA Times would have treated us to a thousand stories about the "baseball cap thief." The Miami Herald didn’t have the chance because Florida didn’t have a three strikes law, so Singleton didn’t get life in prison for stealing the baseball cap.
The next crime Singleton committed was to kill his next door neighbor.
Three Strikes has saved thousand of lives in California, but Judge Karlton doesn’t care. He also doesn’t care that it is Mark Leno and the leftists in the Legislature that are causing the prison overcrowding, not California’s criminal laws. Judge Karlton’s cure for prison overcrowding is worse than the disease.