The 2012 California Three Strikes reform ballot initiative marked a statewide rejection of mandatory sentences for nonviolent offenders. Bryan Stevenson supported the ballot measures in California, and voters chose by a huge margin to end the California Three Strikes law, a reform he placed within a rare national turn away from decades of prison growth.

Background and Stakes

The vote came as the country’s prison population was beginning to change direction. For the first time in close to forty years, it had not increased in 2011; in 2012, the United States recorded its first decline in decades. Stevenson saw the California initiative against that wider backdrop, where a policy imposing mandatory sentences on nonviolent offenders had become a subject of popular reconsideration.

The Vote

California voters approved the reform by a huge margin. Its support extended across the state: the initiative won a majority in every county. The breadth of that result made the vote more than a narrow local exception to punitive policy; it showed that reform could command support throughout California.

A Wider Political Opening

The initiative unfolded alongside a separate California ballot measure to abolish the death penalty. That measure came close but lost by only a couple of percentage points. Stevenson described the prospect of nearly abolishing the death penalty by popular referendum in an American state as unimaginable just a few years earlier. Together, the results revealed both the reach and the limits of the political opening: voters decisively ended mandatory sentences for nonviolent offenders, while abolition of the death penalty remained just beyond reach.