Brian A Smith didn’t know the two women who were shoplifting. They were caught on security cameras stealing sheets at the Los Cerritos mall in Los Angeles and received a two-year sentence.
But Smith was seen standing near the shoplifters as they committed their crime. Despite having no stolen goods, he was convicted of aiding and abetting them.
Under California’s three strikes law, which marked its 10th anniversary last Sunday, the 30-year-old received a 25-year-to-life sentence.
Smith’s crime was to have two previous convictions, one 11 years earlier and the second six years before the shoplifting incident. Those convictions, for purse snatching in 1983 and burglary in 1988, earned him the dubious honour of being one of the first criminals to be sentenced under the California law.
By September last year, California, the state with the highest prison population, had 7 234 prisoners held under the three strikes rule.
Smith’s aunt, Dorothy Erskine, a retired schoolteacher, recalls the family’s reaction to his sentence. ”We were like, is this really happening? I’m sure he was in shock when he was sentenced and thought he could get it reduced on appeal.”
Three or four years after he went to prison, Smith suffered a stroke.
”They didn’t notify anyone in the family that anything had happened to him,” said his aunt, ”but when I went to visit him and they rolled him down in a wheelchair I knew that something had happened.
”He says it was like a wake-up call, and he has turned his life to the Lord.”
Erskine keeps a picture of her nephew in her living room. His hands behind his back, he smiles tentatively at the camera.
Last Saturday that picture was one of almost a hundred displayed on mock gravestones at a vigil held at Leipert Park in south Los Angeles for prisoners incarcerated under the three strikes law. Each ”gravestone” bears witness to the haphazard sentencing under the legislation.
With the slogan ”Buried Alive!” above each name and the case history, the gravestones read like a roll call of the disappeared: Richard Morgan, 25 years for shoplifting a baseball glove; Herman Clifford Smith, 25 years for trying to cash a forged cheque for $193; Johnny Quirino, 25 years for stealing razor blades.
Under the three strikes law, 25 years means 25 years: prisoners have no chance of parole. The law was voted for in March 1994, but unlike the three strikes laws operating in other states, California’s version does not restrict the initiative to violent crimes.
Sixty-five percent of those imprisoned under the law in California were convicted of non-violent crimes; 354 of them received 25-years-to-life sentences for petty theft of less than $250.
Campaigners for an amendment to the legislation point to the cost of the sentencing policy, with the imprisonment of non-violent offenders under the three strikes law estimated to cost the state nearly $1-billion a year.
The three strikes policy has also disproportionately affected blacks and Hispanics. The African-American incarceration rate is 12 times that for whites, while the rate for Hispanics is 45% higher.
This November voters in California will be given the opportunity to amend the three strikes legislation. Dorothy Erskine is optimistic.
”Ten years from now we will not have this law as it is,” she said. ”There will not be a 20th anniversary.” — Â