Poilievre's proposed 'three-strikes' law could increase homicides and cost a lot of money
Studies find the three-strikes laws in the United States have done nothing to deter crime, and may even increase homicide rates
As he seeks to shift the election discourse away from Donald Trump, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is leaning into 1990s-style tough-on-crime rhetoric and campaign promises.
Poilievre has even gone so far as to say he will override people’s constitutional rights, using the notwithstanding clause to counter any court decision that runs counter to his agenda.
The rhetoric and campaign promises have ranged from allowing consecutive sentences for first-degree murder — a Stephen Harper-era law that was overturned by the courts in 2022 — to bringing in a three-strikes-and-you’re-out law to apply life sentences to offenders with three “serious” offences with no parole eligibility for at least 10 years.
The latter copies three-strikes laws introduced in the United States in the 1990s, of which there is a significant body of evidence.
The logic behind the laws, as one 2001 study puts it, “everything else being equal, a person will be less likely to commit a crime when the expected costs increase. The additional prison terms called for by three-strikes laws increase the expected costs for criminals subject to the laws and, at first glance, the expected result is less crime.”
However, the evidence ultimately does not back Poilievre.
Crime didn’t go down
One 1998 study, submitted to the US Department of Justice by the RAND Institute, noted that “at first glance, the experiences of states with three-strikes laws appear to support the notion that these laws are having an effect.”
As incarceration rates rose between 1986 and 1996 in a sample of eight states with both large urban areas and three-strikes laws, police-reported violent crime rates had declined in seven of those eight states. But the study notes that this was part of a nationwide trend in the 1990s (which has largely continued through today).
Compared to states without three-strikes laws, the study noted those with the laws “did not in general rank ahead of states without three-strikes laws. In fact, the differences in ranking between the two groups was not statistically significant.”
It added that the decline in crime rates had begun a year prior to the law taking effect.
Increasing homicides
The previously mentioned 2001 study, titled The Lethal Effects of Three-Strikes Laws, has even found three-strikes laws to be associated with significant increases in homicides.
The study notes that there are a number of reasons for the lack of any significant effect on crime rates. The laws tend to have limited scope, and they apply to those who are already repeat offenders — those who are likely to receive longer sentences regardless of the three-strikes law.
“Criminals can also continue to commit the same crimes and adapt to crime reduction efforts by taking additional measures to reduce the chances of apprehension and conviction,” the paper notes.
“Bribing police is probably the most studied example.”
The “additional measures” referenced could also be related to the increase in homicides.
In particular, a person committing a crime may be more likely to kill the victim — or any witnesses — if there’s a likelihood of being identified, and if they are facing a life sentence due to the three-strikes law anyway.
That calculation may not commonly take place in the moment, but the study’s authors note that even if the offender is making that judgment in one in a thousand violent crimes, that would have added up to a 17% increase in homicides in three-strikes states.
While the three-strikes states’ decline in police-reported crime following the implementation of their laws was effectively on par with the nationwide, the decline in homicides in that time was not equally distributed.
In all, three-strikes states saw a 10-12% short-term increase in homicides compared to non-three-strikes states and a 23-29% long-term increase.
That adds up to 1,440 additional homicides in the short term and another 3,300 homicides per year in the long term, according to the study.
‘Common sense’
It isn’t just three-strikes laws that lack evidentiary backing — lengthy prison sentences in general are not associated with declining crime rates, but rather can have the opposite effect.
A 2021 meta-analysis of 116 studies found that imprisonment has either no effect on reoffending, or can even increase reoffending compared to non-imprisonment sentences, such as probation.
Proponents of tough-on-crime legislation tend to characterize their policies as “common sense.”
In fact, “common sense” is a common tactic by the far-right and free-market proponents, often acting not as an appeal to reason, but rather as a sort of notwithstanding clause to override evidence.
The authors of the meta-analysis note that there is logic to the notion that harsher sentencing would act as a deterrent — that a cost-benefit analysis at the time of a crime would lead to fewer crimes if the cost outweighs the benefit.
However they note that there are “several logical and empirical reasons to be skeptical” of an idea that has “intuitive appeal.”
For one, reoffending rates for those sentenced to jail or prison are high. The authors of the study also note that certainty of punishment plays a key role in deterrence — the low likelihood of a high cost is not going to be given as much weight, and the vast majority of crime does not end in incarceration.
And while incarceration may prevent offenders from committing crimes in the community, it could lead to more reoffending following release than if a person serves their sentence in the community.
The meta-analysis notes that prisons have “long been referred to as a ‘school of crime’ or ‘house of corruption’ because of the likelihood that techniques of and motivations for crimes are transmitted between inmates.”
The federal government has known this to be true for decades.
In 1999, the solicitor general’s office analyzed 50 studies looking at 300,000 inmates, with none of the studies finding imprisonment to reduce recidivism, while longer sentences were associated with a 3% increase in recidivism — an effect that held for both low- and high-risk offenders.
Tough-on-crime, high-on-cost
According to Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes Project, the 1994 California law had been intended to “keep murderers, rapists and child molesters behind bars, where they belong,” but “more than half of inmates sentenced under the law are serving sentences for nonviolent crimes.”
The project cites statistics from the California Department of Corrections showing the law disproportionately applied life sentences to Black, mentally ill and physically disabled defendants.
The United States, with its tough-on-crime policies, has more inmates than any other country on earth — and that isn’t cheap.
In all the US spends $80 billion annually on corrections — but a working paper by the Institute for Justice Research and Development at Florida State University notes that is just a sliver of the overall economic cost.
The paper looks at an array of further costs, including lost wages for inmates while incarcerated ($70.5 billion annually), reduced lifetime earnings after incarceration due to lower wages and hiring challenges ($230 billion), the cost of non-fatal injuries while incarcerated ($28 billion); the increased likelihood of a person committing a crime after incarceration ($285.8 billion), homelessness of formerly incarcerated people ($2.2 billion) and more.
In all, the paper finds incarceration costs more than $1 trillion per year, or about 6% of GDP in the US.