COMMENTARY: 'Three strikes' and the public

DAN WALTERS

Major California newspapers this month reported the startling news that three-quarters of California voters were inclined to soften the very tough "three strikes and you're out" criminal sentencing law, adopted more than a decade ago by the Legislature and voters.

"I'm shocked," The Sacramento Bee quoted Dave LaBahn, executive director of the California District Attorneys Association, about the poll. "We have our work cut out for us to educate the public. Seventy-six percent is a huge, huge number."

The articles were based on a poll by the highly respected Field Institute, which found that 76 percent of voters — 80 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of Republicans — were in favor of a November ballot measure that would allow as many as 25,000 prison inmates to be released. But the poll's methodology appears to be fatally flawed.

The current law, enacted after a recently released felon kidnapped and murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993, allows even relatively minor crimes to count as second and third strikes, resulting in prison terms ranging up to life, and has withstood court tests and periodic legislative efforts to modify it. Law enforcement officials see it as a tool to rid society of repeat offenders and contend that it has lowered crime rates. Critics abhor the fact that defendants can face terms up to life in prison for relatively minor subsequent offenses and say it has packed the prisons with non-dangerous inmates. The ballot measure, if enacted, would allow prison terms for convicted felons to be enhanced on second and third offenses only if the new crimes are violent and/or serious ones.

The powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association provided seed money to get the law adopted and is expected to defend it because its passage would free thousands of inmates now guarded by union members. One of those who would probably earn early release is Richard Keenan, the 25-year-old son of Jerry Keenan, a Sacramento, Calif., insurance agency owner who spent more than $1.5 million to collect signatures for the measure. Keenan's son is serving a stiff term for vehicular homicide, stemming from an auto crash that killed two passengers.

The specific methodology that Field used to test voter sentiment on the three strikes measure may have produced an inaccurate result, as Field's poll director concedes — something akin to a "false positive" in medical tests.

In the first place, the poll respondents were asked to declare themselves after listening to a confusing, 101-word summary of what the measure would do, condensed from the official summary prepared by the attorney general's office. Listening to a polltaker read the summary over the phone, a respondent could easily conclude that the measure would toughen up, rather than weaken, the three strikes law. Portions of the attorney general's summary that might have led to a more accurate understanding of the measure's effects, such as a release of current inmates, were omitted.

Mark DiCamillo, Field's poll director, said that "it's an open question as to what people read into the words" and added, "The summary may be somewhat misleading."

Secondly, Field used a very small sample, just over 300 respondents, to calculate its results since it was measuring sentiment on several other controversial measures at the same time and wanted to minimize what it called "respondent fatigue."

Richard Temple, a Sacramento political consultant who is managing the opposition to the three strikes initiative, wrote an extensive critique of the poll, citing both the confusing wording of the summary and the small sample, and noting that the campaign's own poll, with more than twice as many respondents and a broader explanation of the measure, showed a much different result. Temple said his poll indicted that 25 percent of voters were in favor of the measure, 16 percent were opposed and the remaining 61 percent were undecided.

Temple's poll, which rings truer, indicates that changing California's three strikes law is, in fact, an open question for most voters — a deeply divisive, even philosophical issue that will generate a very hard-fought campaign and test the political adage that voters are very hard on crime.

Dan Walters writes for the Sacramento Bee.

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