6/20/08: When it comes to justice, it's personal

Three-strikes laws are out, as far as I’m concerned.

Forget that a three-strikes law would not have prevented the heinous home invasions perpetrated in central Connecticut over the past year. Forget that they would not have prevented reportedly depressed, 76-year-old Leon Malicki’s alleged attack on his wife.

Consider instead the unreasonableness of basing social policy — especially criminal law, which immediately and permanently affects the lives of perpetrators, victims and their families — on the arbitrary rules of baseball.

Legally speaking, there’s no reason for three to be the magic number, according to attorney Michael Fryar, owner of Lawisfun.com.

So why should the commission of three crimes not warranting life in prison add up to more than the sum of their parts?

I tend to agree that repeat offenders continue to offend thanks to some innate impulse to do so, whether personally or socially instigated. But assigning a number to the times they may offend before being written off as "simply evil" is dismissive of mitigating factors and ultimately demeans us and our justice system.

Our justice system is a personal one.

We are not an authoritarian society, allowing elite judges to decide whether one of our members is innocent or guilty when he or she appears to have erred; we convene juries and decide among ourselves.

We give the benefit of the doubt. Our fellow citizens are considered innocent until they’re proven guilty.

As a people, we are interested and invested in seeing justice done, and done properly — only look at the proliferation of "Law and Order"-type television shows as proof.

Why, then, are we driven to add legislation to make sure our system is working properly, rather than driven to a renewed insistence on our responsibilities as a population?

And why is the sort of law we want to add the increasingly impersonal sort, the kind that reduces people — offenders, perhaps, but also citizens — to being judged by formula rather than by a jury of their peers?

Judgment by the numbers is lazy. It allows us to abdicate the responsibility that is ours as American citizens. It allows us to forget, in our understandable frustration at criminal activity, that we are passing judgment on other Americans — other human beings — and that we are obligated to respect them and ourselves by applying ourselves diligently to the question of this particular (alleged) crime at this particular time.

But for those who like the clean, clear-cut efficiency of numbers, here are a few:

America is the only developed nation to incarcerate one in every hundred citizens.

As of June 2006, black men were 6.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men.

Of the convicted citizens in state prisons in 2006, almost 20 percent were there on drug charges.
Many of these are not dealers, but addicts.

Black Americans, again, are much more likely to be imprisoned (33 percent of convicted white drug defendants were sentenced to prison versus 51 percent of convicted black defendants), though a federal Household Survey indicates that most illicit drug users are white.

Felons lose the right to vote. They often have difficulty finding jobs when they return from prison thanks to little or incomplete education and applications requiring reporting of felony convictions.

These are the people who would be most affected by three-strikes laws.

Perhaps instead of mindlessly assigning them lifelong prison sentences, we should consider the kind of systemic reform we really need.

More about that next week.