THREE STRIKES IS A BUST

WASHINGTON "Three strikes" laws requiring long sentences for
threetime violent offenders have made no apparent dent in bringing down
crime in the country, a group that studies the justice system said.

Between 1994 and 1995, violent and overall crime rates dropped more in
the 37 states without three strikes laws than in the 13 that had such
laws, the Justice Policy Institute said Thursday.

Violent crime fell 4.6 percent in states without the laws, compared to
1.7 percent in threestrike states, the liberal group said. For overall
crime, the decline was 1.2 percent for states without the mandatory
sentencing provisions and 0.4 percent for those with the provisions.

The institute said that in California which has aggressively carried out
the law, imprisoning more than 15,000 offenders in two years, violent
crime was down 4.2 percent from 1994 to 1995, still below the level for
states with no threestrike laws.

"It is entirely too early to conclude if threestrikes legislation is
working or not. These early figures do show, however, that any
politician running another campaign on the effectiveness of three strikes
is blatantly misleading the public," the report concluded.

It said crime rates have generally been dropping since 1992 as the baby
boomer generation ages and the crack cocaine epidemic wanes.

The report, which recommended abolishing mandatory sentencing, also cited
a California study that predicted that the three strikes law would triple
the state's prison population over the next 25 years, at a cost of $5.5
billion a year.

The 13 states that had three strikes laws in 1994 were California,
Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, New Mexico,
North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. Of those,
eight saw increases in violent crimes in 1994-95. Since then, 11 other
states have implemented three-strikes laws.

Contributed by, Jerry Sutliff