POLITICAL CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Sacramento - Sue Reams was in 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 though 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 and 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. Haydan 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 dripping 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 politician 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.

But Davis' top prison adviser, Youth and Corrections Secretary Robert
Presley, is also warning that in just two years inmates will occupy "every
nook and cranny" of the prison system and the state must either build more
prisons or "consider alternatives," such as more drug treatment programs.

The Senate Public Safety Committee approved Hayden's measure on a partyline
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.