Hostname: page-component-669899f699-chc8l Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-25T02:47:58.011Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Symbol and Substance: Effects of California's Three Strikes Law on Felony Sentencing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

John R. Sutton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

California's “three strikes and you're out” law is the most notorious example of the wave of mandatory sentencing policies that many states enacted beginning in the late 1970s. While advocates and critics predicted the law would have profound effects on aggregate punishment trends and individual case outcomes, Feeley and Kamin's analysis of previous sentencing reforms suggested the law's impact would be mainly symbolic because local officials would ignore, subvert, or nullify its major provisions. While aggregate analyses have tended to confirm this argument, so far there has been no systematic test of the law's effect on individual cases. This analysis uses multilevel models applied to case-level data from 12 urban California counties to test hypotheses about shifts in average punitiveness, the relative influence of legal and extralegal factors on sentencing, and the uncertainty of sentencing outcomes. Results mostly support Feeley and Kamin's symbolic interpretation, but also reveal important substantive impacts: since Three Strikes, sentences have become harsher, particularly in politically conservative counties, and black felons receive longer prison sentences.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 37 - 71
Copyright
© 2013 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

I am grateful to Ryan King, Traci Schlesinger, and LSR reviewers and editors for their careful reading of earlier drafts and thoughtful suggestions for their improvement. Remaining limitations, errors, and verbal infelicities are wholly my responsibility.

References

References

Albonetti, Celesta A. (1990) “Race and the Probability of Pleading Guilty,” 6 J. of Quantitative Criminology 315–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albonetti, Celesta A. (1991) “An Integration of Theories to Explain Judicial Discretion,” 38 Social Problems 247–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albonetti, Celesta A. (1997) “Sentencing under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines: Effects of Defendant Characteristics, Guilty Pleas, and Departures on Sentence Outcomes for Drug Offenses, 1991–1992,” 31 Law & Society Rev. 789–822.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Auerhahn, Kathleen (1999) “Selective Incapacitation and the Problem of Prediction,” 37 Criminology 703–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austin, James, et al. (1999) “The Impact of ‘Three Strikes and You're Out’,” 1 Punishment & Society 131–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bjerk, David (2005) “Making the Crime Fit the Penalty: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion under Mandatory Minimum Sentencing,” 48 J. of Law & Economics 591–625.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blumstein, Alfred (1982) “On the Racial Disproportionality of United States Prison Populations,” 73 J. of Criminal Law and Criminology 1259–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blumstein, Alfred (1993) “Racial Disproportionality of U.S. Prison Populations Revisited,” 64 Univ. of Colorado Law Rev. 743–60.Google Scholar
Bowen, Deirdre M. (2009) “Calling Your Bluff: How Prosecutors and Defense Attorneys Adapt Plea Bargaining Strategies to Increased Formalization,” 26 Justice Q. 2–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brereton, David, & Casper, Jonathan D. (1982) “Does It Pay to Plead Guilty? Differential Sentencing and the Functioning of Criminal Courts,” 16 Law & Society Rev. 45–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bridges, George, & Steen, Sara (1998) “Racial Disparities in Official Assessments of Juvenile Offenders: Attributional Stereotypes as Mediating Mechanisms,” 63 American Sociological Rev. 554–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Britt, Chester L. (2000) “Social Context and Racial Disparities in Punishment Decisions,” 17 Justice Q. 707–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
California District Attorneys' Association (2004) Prosecutors' Perspective on California's Three Strikes Law: A 10-Year Retrospective. Sacramento, CA: CDAA.Google Scholar
California Legislative Analyst's Office (2005) A Primer: Three Strikes—The Impact after More Than a Decade. Sacramento, CA: California Legislative Analyst's Office.Google Scholar
Chen, Elsa Y. (2008) “Cumulative Disadvantage and Racial and Ethnic Disparities in California Felony Sentencing,” in Cain, B., Regalado, J., & Bass, S., eds., Racial and Ethnic Politics in California. Vol. 3. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Government Studies Press. 251–74.Google Scholar
Cook, R. Dennis, & Weisberg, Sanford (1997) “Graphics for Assessing the Adequacy of Regression Models,” 92 J. of the American Statistical Association 490–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cushman, Robert C. (1996) “Effect on a Local Criminal Justice System,” in Shichor, D., & Sechrest, D. K., eds., Three Strikes and You're Out: Vengeance as Public Policy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 90–106.Google Scholar
Daly, Kathleen (1989) “Rethinking Judicial Paternalism: Gender, Work-Family Relations, and Sentencing,” 3 Gender and Society 9–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demuth, Stephen (2003) “Racial and Ethnic Differences in Pretrial Release Decisions and Outcomes: A Comparison of Hispanic, Black and White Felony Arrestees,” 41 Criminology 873–908.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, Jo (1995) “The Organizational Context of Criminal Sentencing,” 100 American J. of Sociology 1157–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Domanick, Joe (2004) Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America's Golden State. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Eisenstein, James, & Jacob, Herbert (1991) Felony Justice: An Organizational Analysis of Criminal Courts. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Emerson, Robert M. (1983) “Holistic Effects in Social Control Decision-Making,” 17 Law & Society Rev. 425–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engen, Rodney L., & Gainey, Randy R. (2000) “Modeling the Effects of Legally Relevant and Extralegal Factors under Sentencing Guidelines: The Rules Have Changed,” 38 Criminology 1207–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engen, Rodney L., Steen, Sara, & Bridges, George (2002) “Racial Disparities in the Punishment of Youth: A Theoretical and Empirical Assessment of the Literature,” 49 Social Problems 194–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fearn, Noelle E. (2005) “A Multilevel Analysis of Community Effects on Criminal Sentencing,” 22 Justice Q. 452–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feeley, Malcolm (1979) The Process Is the Punishment : Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Feeley, Malcolm M., & Kamin, Sam (1996) “The Effect of ‘Three Strikes and You're Out’ on the Courts: Looking Back to See the Future,” in Shichor, D., & Sechrest, D. K., eds., Three Strikes and You're Out: Vengeance as Public Policy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 135–54.Google Scholar
Frenzel, Erika Davis, & Ball, Jeremy D. (2007) “Effects of Individual Characteristics on Plea Negotiations under Sentencing Guidelines,” 5 J. of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice 59–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, Andrew, & Hill, Jennifer (2007) Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gelman, Andrew, et al. (2004) Bayesian Data Analysis. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall.Google Scholar
Goffman, Alice (2009) “On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto,” 74 American Sociological Rev. 339–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenwood, Peter W., et al. (1994) Three Strikes and You're Out: Estimated Benefits and Costs of California's New Mandatory-Sentencing Law. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.Google Scholar
Hagan, John (1989) “Why Is There So Little Criminal Justice Theory? Neglected Macro-Level and Micro-Level Links between Organization and Power,” 26 J. of Research in Crime and Delinquency 116–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, John C., & Jesilow, Paul (2000) “It's Not the Same Old Ball Game: Three Strikes and the Courtroom Workgroup,” 17 Justice Quarterly 185–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huber, Gregory A., & Gordon, Sanford C. (2004) “Accountability and Coercion: Is Justice Blind When It Runs for Office?,” 48 American J. of Political Science 247–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, David, & Carmichael, Jason T. (2001) “The Politics of Punishment across Time and Space: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis of Imprisonment Rates,” 80 Social Forces 61–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, David, & Helms, Ronald E. (1996) “Toward a Political Model of Incarceration: A Time-Series Examination of Multiple Explanations for Prison Admission Rates,” 102 American J. of Sociology 323–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kautt, Paula M. (2002) “Location, Location, Location: Interdistrict and Intercircuit Variation in Sentencing Outcomes for Federal Drug-Trafficking Offenses,” 19 Justice Q. 633–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kellough, Gail, & Wortley, Scott (2001) “Remand for Plea. Bail Decisions and Plea Bargaining as Commensurate Decisions,” 42 British J. of Criminology 186–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kessler, Daniel P., & Piehl, Anne M. (1998) “The Role of Discretion in the Criminal Justice System,” 14 J. of Law Economics & Organization 256–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Ryan D., Johnson, Kecia R., & McGeever, Kelly (2010) “Demography of the Legal Profession and Racial Disparities in Sentencing,” 44 Law & Society Rev. 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Ryan S., & Mauer, Marc (2001) Aging Behind Bars: “Three Strikes” Seven Years Later. Washington DC: The Sentencing Project.Google Scholar
Kramer, John H., & Ulmer, Jeffery T. (2002) “Downward Departures for Serious Violent Offenders: Local Court ‘Corrections’ to Pennsylvania's Sentencing Guidelines,” 40 Criminology 897–932.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kruttschnitt, Candace, & McCarthy, Daniel (1985) “Familial Social Control and Pretrial Sanctions: Does Sex Really Matter?,” 76 J. of Criminal Law & Criminology 151–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lafree, Gary D. (1985) “Adversarial and Nonadversarial Justice: A Comparison of Guilty Pleas and Trials,” 23 Criminology 289–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lungren, Dan (1996) “Three Cheers for Three Strikes: California Enjoys a Record Drop in Crime,” 80 Policy Rev. 80. http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7763.Google Scholar
Mather, Lynn M. (1974) “Some Determinants of the Method of Case Disposition: Decision-Making by Public Defenders in Los Angeles,” 8 Law & Society Rev. 187–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miethe, Terance D. (1987) “Charging and Plea Bargaining Practices under Determinate Sentencing: An Investigation of the Hydraulic Displacement of Discretion,” 78 J. of Criminal Law and Criminology 155–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pardoe, Iain, & Cook, R. Dennis (2002) “A Graphical Method for Assessing the Fit of a Logistic Regression Model,” 56 American Statistician 263–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ragin, Charles (1987) The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rodriguez, German, & Goldman, Noreen (1995) “An Assessment of Estimation Procedures for Multilevel Models with Binary Responses,” 158 J. of the Royal Statistical Society Series A 73–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodriguez, German, & Goldman, Noreen (2001) “Improved Estimation Procedures for Multilevel Models with Binary Response: A Case Study,” 164 J. of the Royal Statistical Society Series A 339–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sampson, Robert, & Lauritsen, Janet (1997) “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States,” in Tonry, M., ed., Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration: Comparative and Cross-National Perspectives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 311–74.Google Scholar
Savelsberg, Joachim J. (1992) “Law That Does Not Fit Society: Sentencing Guidelines as a Neoclassical Reaction to the Dilemmas of Substantivized Law,” 97 American J. of Sociology 1346–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schlesinger, Traci (2007) “The Cumulative Effects of Racial Disparities in Criminal Processing,” 7 J. of the Institute of Justice & International Studies 268–85.Google Scholar
Spohn, Cassia (2000) “Thirty Years of Sentencing Reform: The Quest for a Racially Neutral Sentencing Policy,” 3 Criminal Justice: The National Institute of Justice J. 427–501.Google Scholar
Spohn, Cassia, & Delone, Miriam (2000) “When Does Race Matter? An Analysis of the Conditions under Which Race Effects Sentence Severity,” 2 Sociology of Crime, Law, and Deviance 3–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spohn, Cassia, & Holleran, David (2000) “The Imprisonment Penalty Paid by Young, Unemployed Black and Hispanic Male Offenders,” 38 Criminology 281–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spohn, Cassia, & Spears, J. W. (1997) “Gender and Case Processing Decisions: A Comparison of Case Outcomes for Male and Female Defendants Charged with Violent Felonies,” 8 Women and Criminal Justice 29–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steen, Sara, Engen, Rodney L., & Gainey, Randy R. (2005) “Images of Danger and Culpability: Racial Stereotyping, Case Processing, and Criminal Sentencing,” 43 Criminology 435–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steffensmeier, Darrell, & Demuth, Stephen (2000) “Ethnicity and Sentencing in U.S. Federal Courts: Who Is Punished More Harshly?,” 65 American Sociological Rev. 705–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steffensmeier, Darrell, Kramer, John, & Streifel, Cathy (1993) “Gender and Imprisonment Decisions,” 31 Criminology 411–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stolzenberg, Lisa, & D'alessio, Stewart J. (1997) “Three Strikes and You're Out': The Effect of California's New Mandatory Sentencing Law on Serious Crime Rates,” 43 Crime & Delinquency 457–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stucky, Thomas D., Heimer, Karen, & Lang, Joseph B. (2005) “Partisan Politics, Electoral Competition and Imprisonment: An Analysis of States over Time,” 43 Criminology 211–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stuntz, William J. (1997) “The Uneasy Relationship between Criminal Procedure and Criminal Justice,” 107 Yale Law J. 1–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stuntz, William J. (2001) “The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law,” 100 Michigan Law Rev. 505–600.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stuntz, William J. (2011) The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sudnow, David (1964) “Normal Crimes: Sociological Features of the Penal Code in the Public Defender's Office,” 12 Social Problems 255–75.Google Scholar
Sutton, John R. (1987) “Doing Time: Dynamics of Imprisonment in the Reformist State,” 52 American Sociological Rev. 612–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sutton, John R. (2004) “The Political Economy of Imprisonment in Affluent Western Democracies,” 69 American Sociological Rev. 170–89.Google Scholar
Tonry, Michael (1988) “Structuring Sentencing,” 10 Crime and Justice 267–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tonry, Michael H. (1996) Sentencing Matters. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Turner, Susan, et al. (1999) “The Impact of Truth-in-Sentencing and Three Strikes Legislation: Prison Populations, State Budgets, and Crime Rates,” 11 Stanford Law & Policy Rev. 75–83.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (2007) State Court Processing Statistics, 1990–2004: Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.Google Scholar
U.S. Sentencing Commission (1991) Mandatory Minimum Penalties in the Federal Criminal Justice System: Special Report to the Congress. Washington, DC: The Commission.Google Scholar
Ulmer, Jeffery T., & Johnson, Brian (2004) “Sentencing in Context: A Multilevel Analysis,” 42 Criminology 137–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ulmer, Jeffery T., & Kramer, John H. (1996) “Court Communities under Sentencing Guidelines: Dilemmas of Formal Rationality and Sentencing Disparity,” 34 Criminology 383–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weidner, Robert R., & Frase, Richard S. (2003) “Legal and Extralegal Determinants of Intercounty Differences in Prison Use,” 14 Criminal Justice Policy Rev. 377–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weidner, Robert R., Frase, Richard S., & Schultz, Jennifer S. (2005) “The Impact of Contextual Factors on the Decision to Imprison in Large Urban Jurisdictions: A Multilevel Analysis,” 51 Crime & Delinquency 400–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiss, Robert, et al. (1999) “Death Penalty Charging in Los Angeles County: An Illustrative Data Analysis Using Skeptical Priors,” 28 Sociological Methods and Research 91–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Western, Bruce (1999) “Bayesian Analysis for Sociologists: An Introduction,” 28 Sociological Methods and Research 7–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wooldredge, John, & Griffin, Timothy (2005) “Displaced Discretion under Ohio Sentencing Guidelines,” 33 J. of Criminal Justice 301–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wooldredge, John, Griffin, Timothy, & Rauschenberg, Fritz (2005) “(Un)Anticipated Effects of Sentencing Reform on the Disparate Treatment of Defendants,” 39 Law & Society Rev. 835–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Worrall, John L. (2004) “The Effect of Three-Strikes Legislation on Serious Crime in California,” 32 J. of Criminal and Justice 283–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zatz, Marjorie S. (1984) “Race, Ethnicity, and Determinate Sentencing: A New Dimension to an Old Controversy,” 22 Criminology 147–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zatz, Marjorie S. (2000) “The Convergence of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Class on Court Decisionmaking: Looking toward the 21st Century,” 3 Criminal Justice: The National Institute of Justice J. 503–52.Google Scholar
Zimring, Franklin E., Hawkins, Gordon, & Kamin, Sam (2001) Punishment and Democracy: Three Strikes and You're Out in California. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Ewing v. California (2003) 538 U.S. 11.Google Scholar
People v. Fuhrman (1997) 16 Cal. 4th 930.Google Scholar
People v. Superior Court (Romero) (1996) 13 Cal. 4th 497.Google Scholar