THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT

SUE Reams was near tears as she told state legislators Tuesday how her
son came to face life in state prison.

Son Shane, she said, became involved in drugs and committed some
residential robberies, including one of her own home. She turned him
in to authorities.

"We thought he would get some help," the Orange County woman said,
"some drug rehabilitation."

But Shane's drug involvement continued, and 10 years after his
original offenses, he was nailed as the lookout in a drug sale to
undercover cops. It was his third offense, and under the state's
"Three Strikes, You're Out" law, Shane went to prison for 25 years to
life.

The Reams case was one of several related to members of the Senate
Public Safety Committee as it faced legislation that would soften the
law by requiring the third offense to be a violent or serious one.

The author of the measure, Sen. Tom Hayden, D-Los Angeles, and others
argued that "Three Strikes" had sent thousands of men and women to
long prison terms for relatively minor offenses. Hayden characterized
it as "a belief in preventive detention."

But the committee heard equally stout defenses of the law from police
groups, prosecutors, prison guards and victims' rights advocates, who
insisted that the law has contributed greatly to California's dropping
crime rates.

"Every three-striker made a conscious decision to break the law," said
Cynthia Duarte, one of the victims' advocates.

"Three Strikes" was the most emotional, but certainly not the only,
crime issue facing lawmakers Tuesday.

Advocates for the competing factions dashed up and down Capitol
hallways as two legislative committees dealt with dozens of measures
that would either toughen or soften criminal penalties and build more
prisons to handle an inmate population nearing the bursting point.

While the committee hearings were superficially about statistics,
studies and fine points of morality, everyone involved knows that
crime remains a very potent political icon.

Voter and legislative enactment of the "Three Strikes" law in 1994
capped 15 years of converting California from one of the most lenient
states in the nation, in terms of punishment, to one of the toughest.
The state's prison population is now eight times what it was in 1980,
and law enforcement groups have become powerful political players --
especially the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the
prison guards union.

THE CCPOA's three-pronged agenda of passing tougher crime laws,
building more prisons and electing politicians friendly to the first
two goals has been wildly successful. The guards provided critical
funding to get the "Three Strikes" measure enacted and most recently,
backed Democrat Gray Davis' election as governor.

It's probably no coincidence that Davis sides with guards and other
"Three Strikes" advocates, saying recently that "stronger sentencing
... is one of the reasons crime has gone down" and adding that he is
"reluctant" to tamper with the law.

The Senate Public Safety Committee approved Hayden's measure on a
party-line vote -- Democrats for, Republicans against -- and another
bill to study the "Three Strikes" law. But the Assembly Public Safety
Committee cleared a $4.1 billion bond issue to build six more state
prisons. The debate continues.