Sky-High Cost for a Panacea : ‘3 strikes’ anti-crime initiative would require many billions, study finds

As Americans struggle to find ways to achieve national health care reform, cost is an absorbing concern. Yet in the present anti-crime stampede it seems that California lawmakers are all but oblivious to what the price tag will be if the “three strikes and you’re out” notion becomes law. The Legislature is rushing to approve proposals that eventually would thud down onto the state budget with near-paralyzing impact.

The state Department of Corrections on Monday released its long-awaited estimate of costs under a three-strikes initiative that backers will put on the November ballot if a legislative version unexpectedly fails. It turns out that California would have to build 20 prisons--above the 12 already planned--and spend $2 billion a year to operate them by the end of the 1990s. The operating cost would continue to increase for about 30 years, when the additional cost of running the new facilities would be $5.7 billion annually. By that time, the California prison population, now 120,000 inmates and already the largest in any state, would have grown by 275,000. This estimate does not include the court system’s cost for more and possibly longer criminal trials or medical expenditures for the prisons’ mushrooming elderly population.

The initiative and its counterpart bill would impose mandatory life terms for third-time felons, including those convicted of serious but not violent crimes such as burglary. Gov. Pete Wilson says he supports the initiative and its counterpart legislation. Five mandatory-sentencing proposals have passed the Assembly without detailed cost analysis and may go to the Senate floor by Thursday.

After seeing the Corrections Department numbers, Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara), chairman of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, courageously declared: “We can’t afford that. There is no state of California left, except for the police and prison state.”

A wiser and less expensive plan would be to impose life terms on violent repeat felons alone, or perhaps to lock them up only until middle age, when research indicates violence diminishes.