How Large Should the Strike Zone Be in â•œThree Strikes and Youâ•Žre Outâ•š Sentencing Laws?

So-called “three strikes and you’re out” sentencing laws for criminal offenders have proliferated in the United States in the 1990s. The laws vary considerably in their definitions of what constitutes a “strike”. This paper adapts the classic Poisson Process model of criminal offending to investigate how varying sentence lengths and definitions of what constitutes a strike affect the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of these sentencing laws. In particular, it asks whether by using different definitions for the first, second, and third strikes or different sentence lengths, one can make the resulting incarceration more “efficient” in the sense of incapacitating more crimes per cell-year served. Introduction Controlling crime is a perennial concern. Increasingly, controlling the size of the burgeoning prison population and associated its costs is as well. Hence, it is desirable to design criminal justice policies to be efficient, in the sense of averting as many crimes per cell-year or per dollar spent as possible. The quest for efficiency should not, of course, eclipse considerations of justice and due process, but the costs to society of both crime and crime control are large enough to warrant analysis and careful management. In that vein, this paper asks how so-called “Three Strikes and You’re Out” laws should be designed. These laws mandate very long sentences for people who are convicted three times. The first and second convictions typically also result in punishment, but of a more routine character. The name derives from the obvious analogy in American baseball, and these laws appeal to a certain intuitive notion of justice. Everyone is allowed to foul up once, even twice, but three-time offenders forfeit their right to be rehabilitated and are given very long sentences, up to life imprisonment. These laws have sufficient appeal that some type of three strikes law is now on the books in about half the states and in the federal sentencing system (Clark et al., 1997). At first blush it would seem that there is little to design or optimize with three strikes laws. The sentences for the first, second, and third strikes are short, “enhanced”, and approximately infinite, respectively. What more does one need to know? It turns out that considerable design latitude remains. For example, Greenwood et al. (1994) show that the second strike provisions can play as great a role in the costs and effectiveness of California’s three strikes law as the notorious “25 year to life” third strike provision, in part because more people receive second strikes than third strikes. Here the focus is on another issue, namely which offenses constitute “strikes”. To illustrate the distinction, consider in contrast the California and Pennsylvania State laws. California law generally (not the three-strikes law in particular) differentiates between violent offenses, serious offenses that are not also violent, and all other felonies. Roughly speaking, violent offenses are those involving physical injury (primarily murder, rape, robberies and aggravated assaults involving bodily injury or a firearm pursuant to certain penal codes). Serious offenses include some other types of robbery and aggravated assault as well as residential burglary. The other category includes burglary of commercial establishments, theft, motor vehicle theft, fraud, etc. 1 There are variations. Maryland has special sanctions for fourth strikes. Georgia has what amounts to a “two strikes and you’re out” law.