California Three Strikes law

The California Three Strikes law is described as imposing mandatory sentences on nonviolent offenders. In 2012, California voters chose by a huge margin to end the law, making it a prominent example of a shift away from mandatory punishment during a rare national decline in prison populations.

Operation and Reach

The available account identifies the law’s central feature as mandatory sentences for nonviolent offenders. It does not specify the law’s precise sentencing formula or eligibility rules; its focus is the severity of imposing mandatory punishment even in nonviolent cases.

The 2012 Vote

In 2012, an initiative to end the law won majority support in every county in California. Its success by a huge margin marked a statewide repudiation of the policy, rather than a change confined to particular regions of the state.

Place in a National Shift

The vote came as growth in incarceration had begun to falter. For the first time in close to forty years, the United States prison population did not increase in 2011; in 2012, it declined for the first time in decades. The effort to end the California Three Strikes law formed part of this broader change in public policy. In the same year, California voters also came close to banning the death penalty, though that initiative lost by only a couple of percentage points. The contrast shows both the reach and the limits of the shift: voters decisively rejected mandatory sentences for nonviolent offenders, while the separate proposal to abolish capital punishment narrowly failed.