RUSH TO VENGEANCE

VIVID DOCUMENTARY SKILLFULLY WEAVES IN BIGGER QUESTIONS OF THE THREE STRIKES
LAW

Especially in the permit-no-subtlety world of talk radio and
get-tough-on-crime politics, it sounds like a great idea: Pass a law that
tells criminals, "Three strikes and you're out of society for at least 25
years."

Such a notion was on the table in 1994 in California, and it gave filmmaker
Michael J. Moore the more sound concept to chronicle the campaign for its
passage. Moore's 75-minute documentary is a vivid portrait of how populist
politics, the press' and public's disregard for details and an
emotion-stirring crime can turn a seemingly simple idea into monumentally
short-sighted policy.

"The Legacy: Murder & Media, Politics & Prison" (11 p.m. Tuesday, WTTW-Ch.
11) is the first film of the season for "P.O.V.," the first-rate
public-television summer series that showcases the work of independent
documentarians.

The nine-week 1999 season includes films on Japanese-American internment
("Rabbit in the Moon," July 6) and a Mississippi county's battle over
religion in schools ("School Prayer: A Community at War," July 20).

The series is off to a compelling start with "The Legacy," a film whose
tendency to belabor its points cannot overwhelm a fascinating and appalling
story that begins with two murdered girls but leads toward the question of
whether the United States is conducting a kind of race war in its rush to
incarcerate young minority men.

Mike Reynolds and Marc Klaas both had daughters killed in California by
paroled felons; Klaas' daughter was Polly, whose plight became widely known
during the two months between her disappearance and the discovery of her
body.

At the time of Polly's abduction, Reynolds was working hard to get a "Three
Strikes and You're Out" law passed in remembrance of his slain daughter
Kimber, and getting nowhere.

But the attention the Klaas case drew and the identification of her killer
suddenly gave Reynolds the symbol he needed. Not only could he get enough
signatures to place his measure before voters as a ballot initiative, but
campaigning politicians hastened to endorse it and legislators rapidly made
it law.

Never mind, most everybody agreed, what the few naysayers pointed out: that
Reynolds' version of Three Strikes did not differentiate between violent and
non-violent felonies, meaning men could, and later would, go to prison for a
quarter-century and more for stealing a can of beer, if that happened to be
their third offense.

In the rush to vengeance, also ignored were the cries of judges, who felt it
was one more restriction on their ability to be just; the arguments of
social activists, who warned that this law would have a disproportionate
effect on black men, especially; and the analysis of the few politicians
looking beyond the next election, who foresaw a state bankrupting itself, or
at least sabotaging its vaunted public university system, in its zeal to
build and fill prisons.

At first, Marc Klaas signed on to the Three Strikes campaign. But when his
father began to look closer at the law, he saw its flaws and convinced his
son they did not want Polly's legacy to be locking men up and throwing the
key away for drug possession or writing bad checks.

So the Klaases began an ultimately futile statewide countercampaign, trying
to stop an overloaded bandwagon that was moving at race-car speed. And they
had to listen as Polly was taken from them again, this time by Reynolds and
his allies. Reynolds says in an interview, chillingly, that Polly couldn't
help who her father was.

The film is told mostly through first-person interviews and contemporary
news footage, and as it progresses Moore skillfully weaves in the bigger
questions.

By the end, his statistics and interviews and observation add up to an
indictment of making criminal-justice policy in moments of high emotion.
California's violent crime rate did go down in the three years after Three
Strikes, the film says, but no more so than in states without such laws.

And by 1998 one in five California inmates was being sentenced under the
law -- in 80 percent of those cases for non-violent crimes.