ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 7, 1997 TAG: 9703070041
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Violent crime fell 4.6 percent in states without the laws and 1.7 percent in three-strike states, the group said.
Three-strikes laws mandating long sentences for three-time violent offenders have made no apparent dent in crime in the country, a group that studies the justice system said Thursday.
From 1994 to 1995, both violent and overall crime rates dropped more in the 37 states without three-strikes laws than in the 13 that had such laws, said the Justice Policy Institute.
Violent crime fell 4.6 percent in states without the laws, compared with 1.7 percent in three-strike 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 three-strike laws.
``It is entirely too early to conclude if three-strikes 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.
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