> though-- a recent national study (done by the Sentencing Project I think)
> showed that of the many states that have recently passed 3-strike laws, only
> California actually uses them
Not exactly. It's just that California has the most wildly indiscriminate form of 3-strikes law (passed as an initiative, natch), under which folks have gotten 25-to-life sentences for stealing pizzas & such.
Nonetheless, there is some discretion at the country prosecutor level, and it turns out that those who use it least have seen the largest reductions in crime, one of the major fincings in a just-released report "Striking Out: The Failure of California's 'Three Strikes and You're Out' Law", just out [released on the web 1 week ago today] from the Justice Policy Institute at http://www.cjcj.org/jpi/strikingout.html
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"