EXPERTS QUESTION EFFECTIVENESS OF 'THREE STRIKES' LAW

SACRAMENTO -- Midway through Dan Lungren's eight-year tenure as California's
top cop~ the state adopted a law with the power to send a pizza thief away
for life.

Now, as the Republican seeks to become governor, he credits the 1994 "Three
Strikes" law he helped draft for his proudest achievement: a drop in the
state's crime rate to levels not seen since the 1960s.

"There is no single event, activity, decision, law, judgment, in this period
of time that I call the three strikes era -- Other than three strikes --
that could explain the tremendous acceleration in the drop in crime,"
Lungren said on one occasion.

Experts are skeptical. "It's a silly statement to say one thing is causing
this," said James Austin, a criminologist with the Natural Council on Crime
and Delinquency, who has studied the state's Three Strikes law.

The crime-fighting claim hasn't seemed to catch fire with the public or help
him chip away at opponent Gray Davis' narrow but persistent lead in most
polls.

Lungren has run TV ads saying Davis opposed the law but in fact, the year
the Legislature passed three strikes legislation, Davis, who was then
controller, supported a slightly different version of the bill.

State laws toughened

California's three strikes law was one of the first and toughest of similar
measures since enacted in 24 states. But more than 1,000 bills toughening
the state criminal code were passed by the Legislature in the decade before
the Three Strikes law. Cities used federal dollars to hire more cops and set
up prevention programs like midnight basketball.

The crime rate had been falling before the law took effect, And since 3994,
the crime rate has fallen in counties such as Alameda and San Francisco
where prosecutors seldom use the Three Strikes law, suggesting that other
factors are at work, criminal experts say.

"Probably the greatest reason why the crime rate is going down may have
something to do with the economy," said Cecil Canton, a professor of
criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento.

The law took aim at repeat offenders or "mini-crime waves" responsible for
almost 18 times as many crimes as the typical petty criminal, according to a
Rand Corp. study.

On the stump, Lungren is fond of saying it doesn't even take "three strikes"
to put a bad guy behind bars for a long time.

A felon with one prior "strike" for a violent or serious crime faces a
sentence of double the normal term for any new felony. One with a record of
two prior violent or serious felony crimes must be sentenced to 25 years to
life for the third "strike," which can be any felony.

Pizza thief gets served

California's law made national head-lines when a Judge in Los Angeles
sentenced a man to 25 years to life for stealing a slice of pepperoni pizza
be-cause he had prior convictions for rob-beD' and attempted robbery.

The state Supreme Court later decided that Judges could ignore prior
strikes, and defendants sentenced under the law could ask for new sentencing
hearings.

Last year, the Judge eased the sentence, ruling that the man will be
eligible for parole next year.

A majority of the more than 40,000 inmates sentenced under the law were
convicted of nonviolent crimes such as drug possession, theft and burglary,
Analysts with the nonpartisan Rand Corp, have tracked the law since it was
adopted, compared California's crime rate to other states without a Three
Strikes law and determined that the law itself was not responsible for the
drop in crime,

No essential difference

"What we've seen so far, there's no essential difference," said Peter
Green-wood, director of Rand's criminal Justice program.

Greenwood and others say the law could have had a far bigger impact had
there been enough jails, prisons, prosecutors and money to keep the
criminals moving through the system and put away for life.

They cite a number of reasons the law alone has not reduced crime, even
though it's given credit for doing so by Lungren and a host of other
politicians.

Checked-by: Don Beck