Between 1960 and 1994, California saw a 500% increase in all forms of crime. The root cause of this increase in crime was a systematic decrease in prison sentences, literally cutting the average time a convicted criminal spent in prison by over 50%, then granting a variety of different methods of reducing the time of the sentence, methods like “good time” or “work time” reductions to those sentences. A convicted criminal would often be sentenced to a determinate sentence of 5 years, and end up spending less than half of that in prison.
The left constantly reinforced the attitude that prison sentences don’t deter crime. They have always seen criminals of some sort of modern Jean Valjean, a noble hero, driven by economic circumstance to steal bread to feed his or her family, while those who believe in the rule of law as some puritanical Javert, who care not about the person who broke the law, but only about enforcing the law.
After the passage of three strikes in 1994, the crime rate dropped by 50% in one year, for the first time in over 30 years. The law had a real effect on the criminal class. For the incorrigible felon, he or she would be kept in prison for at least 25 years. For the other felons who would perform the cost/benefit analysis of continuing their life of crime, they would decide that the benefit of the crime was not worth the cost of a lifetime in prison. The impact of the three strike law was immediate and measurable. For the first time in several decades, businesses and people in California felt safe, and crime was not a political issue.
Democrats, however, were angry. They began their immediate attack on three strikes, not directly, but by subtle means. First, they refused to build any prisons, then cooperated with left wing groups that brought lawsuits because the prisons were “overcrowded.” The lawsuit was a set up, a conspiracy between the left wing legislators and left wing activists to get a federal left wing judge running the California prisons. It worked. The left wing judge started ordering the prison population to be reduced, and the Department of Corrections started letting bad guys go to satisfy the federal intrusion into the California prison system, an intrusion created by the Legislature’s purposeful neglect of the prison system.
The Democrats then passed Proposition 47, which revamped the classification of crimes, removing most of them from the effects of three strikes. Since three strikes required conviction of three serious or violent felonies (the story is long than that, but that description will do for this article), the left decided they would just reclassify felonies, either making them non-serious or nonviolent, or reducing the crime from a felony to a misdemeanor.
The result was so predictable that one could argue it was planned by the Democrats in the Legislature. The crime rate skyrocketed again, back to pre-1994 levels. Once again, businesses and people feared, and still fear, for their lives and property due to this predictable increase in street crime.
In 2012, I wrote an article predicting the chaos we are seeing in the street of California that we are seeing today. This chaos took a little longer than I thought it would, but it was easy to predict.
And finally we see Proposition 36, coming on November’s ballot. Crime is a political issue again. The only question is whether the voters will hold the Democrats accountable for the policies they put in place that have jeopardized the lives and property of Californians.
The fact is criminals are not Jean Valjean, and the police are not Javert. There is nothing noble about stealing from or hurting people and nothing evil about putting those who commit these heinous crimes in jail. Let the vermin running our streets in California beware, three strikes is coming back, and even the Democrats are afraid to stop it.