What has been missing from the “three strikes” debate on criminal punishment in Massachusetts is an acknowledgement of the allusion to baseball.
Even my own previous commentary on the subject passed right over the baseball thing – a shocking omission for someone lobbying to become sports editor of Banker & Tradesman.
The squeamishness about, and muffled enthusiasm for, the three-strikes legislation – which will sort of, kind of, usually, eliminate the possibility of parole for habitual offenders (“three strikes and you’re out”) – is in need of some baseball clarity to help focus on the real issues.
In baseball, three strikes doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out, doomed to shuffle back to the dugout in shame. You can foul off balls forever as a hitter – foul balls are strikes, but that third strike never actually arrives, as long as you tick that ball with your bat – and no one catches that “third strike.”
Some batters do it on purpose, to help wear out the pitcher – or to fight off a sneaky pitcher who throws clever pitches that dart in and out of the strike zone.
How does this relate to criminal justice; to the notion that if you commit three serious crimes, you’re shuffled off to prison for life?
The impetus for three-strikes legislation takes its inspiration from baseball. In truth, criminals in most jurisdictions can foul the ball off almost indefinitely – and never get sent back to the dugout for extended periods of time.
There was Melissa, raped and killed in Massachusetts by a creature who had already been convicted of 27 crimes. The creature who killed her just kept fouling off the third strike – never being put away forever.
Even when we’re not playing for the World Series of crime, the third strike issue pops up with great regularity. There was Bob Lewis, in Nebraska, the proud acquirer of 52 convictions, ranging from marijuana possession to disturbing the peace to, of course, five convictions for drunk driving. The third strike? He just kept fouling it off.
It was the year 2000 when Jerome Suggs, a model citizen of Connecticut, was finally sentenced to life in prison without parole (the federal “three strikes” law), after acquiring his 23rd felony conviction. The federal law offers up a special knuckleball that makes it difficult to perpetually foul off.
Squeeze Play
The inability to actually strike out repeat offenders indicates a lack of top-rate pitching on the part of the vast criminal justice system – be it legislators, judges, prisons, prosecutors, or the army of social-service types who chant the virtues of “rehabilitation.”
The reality is that we take some comfort in the old-fashioned notion that “deterrence” comes in the form of an arrest and incarceration – although the evidence suggests that the bad guys don’t really “learn their lesson” and don’t actually believe a third strike means they are out.
Recent research from the Pew Center on the States found that 40 percent of convicts return to prisons within three years – a dismal pattern that hasn’t changed much in years. The public policy response, in large part, has been to say a secret prayer that the repeaters issue bad checks or sell a bit of marijuana as a means of coming to law enforcement’s attention again – as opposed to rape and murder and other public safety horrors.
There’s no easy “squeeze bunt” that’s going to bring a solution home from third base. Even the knee-jerk, simple-minded “liberal-conservative” thing isn’t very helpful when it comes to locking up the bad guys.
The lefty wing is torn between the social-worker types who want to transform the bad guys into Fidelity bond traders, and the unionized prison guards, who never saw an extra prisoner or prison they didn’t like just fine. The conservatives enjoy “getting tough on crime,” but hold their noses a bit at the expense of draconian prison sentences – including those “three strikes” folks.
In the end, public relations play an important role in all this. While some murky research suggests that an overly enthusiastic three-strikes law doesn’t do much to lower crime rates, the ability to put away the most dangerous and amoral creatures – the guys who foul off too many third strikes and add to the body count of innocent victims – is compelling enough to move forward.
Let’s play ball.
