Three Strikes & I'll Run Your Arm Over with a Truck

(I should note, that the photographs this title is alluding to actually may have been misinterpretted; however, I think the feelings they evoke are descriptive enough of what I'm trying to get at here.)

I used to think it ridiculously easy to argue against deterrence as the primary basis of punishment. All you have to do (I thought) is show some example of punishment that theoretically may have deterred people but which pretty much all of us consider way out of line.

For example, executing people for stealing cloth. Now, stealing cloth wasn't the only non-lethal capital crime in Britain - others were armed robbery, stealing with the use of a mask or other disguise, and saying something about the King that he didn't like. But for a time in Halifax, cloth was considered so foundational to the economy that the first beheading machine in Britain (probably the first ever) was set up to deter the theft of it.

I expect most people in my place and time to think what I think about this - that proportionality is an integral part of justice, and that ending someone's life radically exceeds the degree of force that was initiated by stealing cloth. But I heard something at work today that makes me fear that this idea isn't all that obvious to people.

One girl was talking about the Three Strikes Law, and about that poor bum who almost served a life sentence for nicking some tools from a truck ("About 3,700 prisoners in the state are serving life for a third strike that was neither violent nor serious, according to the legal definition."). Nicking tools is a stupid crime. People shouldn't have to pay with the rest of their lives for stupid crimes.

Then some dude piped up and said something like "Well if a few years in prison won't deter them from committing the same stupid crimes over and over..." as if now the crime that merits a life sentence is chronic stupidity.

This greatly disheartens me. Just one slip on the ideological banana peel can get a guy who aproves of life sentences for non-violent crimes to also approve of the death penalty for those crimes. And if Three Strikes looks totally normal to some people (in fact, to most California voters - California voters!), then what else can look good and right to them?