LOOK BEHIND STATISTICS OF 'THREE STRIKES' STORY

THE San Jose Mercury News' praise of the "three strikes" law is unwarranted
("Sentencing law appears to have met its goal," Page 1A, Dec. 28).

In evaluating the effectiveness of the law, you leave out a key piece of
evidence that discounts its conclusion: There is no statistical correlation
between the number or rate of people imprisoned and the crime rate. The
"three strikes" law has not reduced the crime rate by "keeping the most
dangerous criminals off of the street." Some may point out that the crime
rate has dropped since the law was implemented in 1994, but they fail to
mention that the crime rate started dropping drastically several years
before "three strikes" was around.

Most criminologists will tell you that the crime rate has been dropping
because the "baby boomers," who were at ripe ages to commit crime between
the 1960s and the late 1980s, have retired their criminal tendencies, and
not because we are locking up recidivists.

Judy Bandermann

Graduate student in criminology, San Jose State University

As usual, the Mercury News is doing a yeoman's job in covering a difficult
issue. Your stories on "three strikes," however, give us a whiff of the
elephant in the living room, but don't specifically cite it.

As Professor Franklin Zimring might have told you, the most notorious
scientific error is generalization from a small sample. While Santa Clara
may not be overusing "three strikes" as much as some counties, others,
notably Kern, certainly are. There, District Attorney Ed Jaegels is still
trying to "law'n'order" himself into the attorney general's seat.

A Chicago study clearly showed that black youthful offenders stood a 50
times greater chance of being sent to an adult prison than whites who'd
been originally arrested for identical crimes. States like Minnesota,
Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming send Native Americans to jail at up to 10
times the rates of whites.

Following campaign contributions, or the murky trail of initiative sponsor
spending, the "three strikes" situation becomes much clearer. Gray Davis
got more contributions from the prison guards' association than any other
special interest. The so-called "victims' rights" initiative which caused
the passage of "three strikes" in the first place was paid for by those
same guards, plus the bond brokers for prison construction, and the
contractors who built them.

So "three strikes" is doing its job. It's helping people to get rich,
elected, or both.

Frank Smith

Bluff City, Kan.