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11 Stan. L. & Pol'y Rev. 9 (1999-2000)
Why Are Tough on Crime Policies So Popular

handle is hein.journals/stanlp11 and id is 13 raw text is: Why Are Tough on Crime
Policies So Popular?
by
Marc Mauer

When Michael Riggs stole a
$20 bottle of vitamins from a
California supermarket in 1995, it  Despite th
probably never occurred to him   ofpolitical
that the U.S. Supreme Court would  o   oiia
eventually consider his act of        others
shoplifting.' The California Court
of Appeals described Mr. Riggs'     promote
crime as being motivated by
homelessness and hunger,2 and his    effective
drug  addiction was apparently       h
brought upon by the death of his jightting    cr
young son  If Mr. Riggs thought
at all of the legal consequences of  on  crime
his actions before he stole the      have pn
vitamins, it is highly unlikely that
he imagined he would receive a       costly    am
sentence of 25 years to life for his
crime. However, due to his prior
convictions and California's Three Strikes and You're
Out law, that is precisely the sentence he received for his
offense.' Without the Three Strikes law, Mr. Riggs's
crime would have carried a maximum sentence of six
months. The lengthy sentence Mr. Riggs received under
the Three Strikes law will now cost California taxpayers

Marc Mauer is the Assistant Director of The Sentencing Project
in Washington, D.C., a non-profit organization engaged in
research and advocacy on criminal justice policy issues. He
received his B.A. from the State University of New York at Stony
Brook and his M.S.W. from the University of Michigan. Mr.
Mauer is the author of numerous publications on criminal justice
issues, including Race to Incarcerate (The New Press, 1999). In
1996, he received the Donald Cressey Award for contributions to
the field of criminology from the National Council on Crime and
Delinquency.

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about half   a  million  dollars.5
Regardless of whether Mr. Riggs's
promises           offense is what policymakers and the
public had in mind when they
aders and adoptedl the Three Strikes policy, his
o  have            sentence is but one example of the
often unsound effects of the two-
'hem    as         decade old movement to get tough
on crime.
9ols for               The overall impact of the get
tough  movement on     American
e, tough          society is even more striking than
policies           individual  sentencing  outcomes.
Along with a host of other societal
d  to  be         changes and criminal justice policy
choices, the get tough movement
unjust.           has contributed to the United States'
current position as a world leader in
the use of incarceration. With an
incarceration rate of 600 per 100,000 population as of
1995, the United States was second only to Russia in its
use of imprisonment, and locked up its citizens at a rate
five to eight times that of most other industrialized
nations.6
In the late 1990s, there was considerable debate
about the impact of get tough policies on the crime rate.
A falling crime rate for much of the decade has led some
to conclude that rising incarceration during this period
was the primary factor responsible for this trend.' This
paper will challenge the notion of such a simplistic, and
overplayed, relationship between these two factors and, in
the process, provide answers to a perhaps more
perplexing question.  How  is it that despite strong
evidence of the relative ineffectiveness of punitive
policies on crime control, support for such policies

VOLUME 111 1999

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