The Lethal Effects of Three‐Strikes Laws

The effect of three-strikes legislation on serious crime in California

“…In fact, 2001 and 2002 witnessed three of the first and only largescale, sophisticated empirical studies of the effects of three-strikes legislation on crime (Kovandzic, Sloan, & Vieraitis, 2002;Marvell & Moody, 2001;Shepherd, 2002). 1 Prior to that, many researchers studied the impact of three-strikes legislation on prison populations, court backlog, and other criminal justice issues (e.g., Shichor & Sechrest, 1996) and found that, at least in California, the laws have had many detrimental effects.…”

“…Some researchers found that three-strikes deterred crime (e.g., Shepherd, 2002). Others found that three-strikes failed to reduce crime (e.g., Stolzenberg & D'Alessio, 1997), and still others found that the laws actually increased crime, particularly homicide (Kovandzic et al, 2002;Marvell & Moody, 2001). In an effort to improve on existing knowledge, this article builds on previous research and explores the deterrent as well as incapacitative effects of California's three-strikes law on serious crime, after controlling for the frequency of threestrikes sentences.…”

“…Employing a state-level regression analysis, and using data from several years, Marvell and Moody (2001) found that three-strikes laws actually increased the incidence of homicides. They attributed this increase to the theory that thirdstrikers had an incentive to kill victims and witnesses in an effort to avoid apprehension.…”

Selectively Incapacitating Frequent Offenders: Costs and Benefits of Various Penal Scenarios

“…To the degree selective policies attain greater general and specific deterrence, a focus on just the incapacatative effects of selective policy underestimates the benefits of these selective policies (Shepherd 2002). However, to the extent implementation of a selective policy leads to a 'hardening' of crime-offenders facing long-term incapacitation going to extremes to avoid detection, even if for example this would mean they would have to kill for it (Kovandzic et al 2002;Marvell and Moody 2001;Shafer 1999)-a focus on incapacitation may in turn overestimate selective policies ultimate benefits. The model further assumes that others-who would not otherwise have offended-do not replace the incarcerated offenders.…”

Affective Policy Performance Evaluation Model: A Case of an International Trade Policy Implementation

“…In the existing body of research, the impacts of implementation resources on policy performance have been evaluated on the empirical dimensions, such as policy adoption rate [25], crime rate [26], personnel hired [5], political preference [27], political opposition [28], level of corruption [6], total costs spent [29], and other empirical performance indicators. Scholars also suggest capturing affective dimensions, such as values, beliefs, and attitudes of the policy target group, for policy performance evaluation [29][30][31].…”