It should surprise no one that the United $tates Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of sending shoplifters to prison for life.
I am one of over 4,000 nonviolent inmates sentenced under the heavy-hand of California's three strikes sentencing law. All across the state, for those of us similarly situated, our families and supporters had hoped for a favorable ruling in Lockyer v. Andrade and Ewing v. California.
On March 5, 2003, a sharply divided Supreme Court held in a 5 to 4 decision that sending petty theft offenders to prison for life did not violate the 8th Amendment's ban against cruel and unusual punishment.
A nonviolent third strike covers a lot of ground. In California, a three strikes sentence can be given for "any" felony if one has two or more serious or violent priors. It does not matter how long ago these convictions occurred, or how minor the instant offense. Of the 26 states and the federal governments how have a form of three strikes on their books, California stands alone in the "any" felony distinction.
Regardless of what the proponents of three strikes profess, it should not take a Supreme Court debate to illustrate the fundamental unfairness of giving someone a life sentence for a crime which usually carries a sentence of a couple of years. But apparently it does. And obviously the nation's highest court will continue to give states strong deference to do as they please in criminal justice matters, no matter how outrageous or extreme the consequences.
A democratic society cannot support both huge prison systems and successful school districts. They are unable to coexist harmoniously. It is simply not feasible. One feeds off the other. Building and maintaining a vast prison system means school districts will have to suffer.
Dollars earmarked for criminal justice, weather they be for law enforcement or corrections, should never be used to vigorously police and systematically incarcerate as a macro and constant ideology. Obviously, those who victimize deserve to be punished. But education is the key, not mindlessly subscribing to endless domestic wars against one's own people. Bankrupting the future in a futile attempt to sanitize the present has not made the streets safer. On the contrary, Amerika leads the world in both deviance and rates of incarceration.
Since Californians are the ones responsible for overwhelmingly approving three strikes in 1994, they should be the ones to fix it -- not the Supreme Court. Three strikes is purely a California problem, created by California's drug war mongers and prison industrialists.
A 2004 ballot initiative is in the works to amend three strikes to apply to only serious crimes. The goal is not to set free predators and violent criminals, but to close an ugly chapter of California history that had both shoplifters and drug addicts receiving life sentences alongside murders and rapists.
For those of us struck out for non-serious transgressions, we are our only victims. While those who continue to dogmatically cling to the criminal justice status quo are the real perpetrators -- supporting injustice, no matter what the cost.
-- A California prisoner, March 2003
MIM adds:
We join the fight for changes to the California Three Strike law while we maintain our position that it must be eliminated entirely. Laws that increase the imprisonment rate in Amerika are not making the streets safer, instead they are just helping with the targeting of oppressed nations while the real mass murderers, the imperialists, remain in power.