San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 2011 by Marisa Lagos
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/31/MN0F1KFC2T.DTL&type=printable
“We’re missing the significance of the second strike,” said UC Berkeley’s Barry Krisberg, director of research and policy at the school’s Institute on Law and Social Policy. “It is having an enormous impact on our prison population, and many second-strikers are serving more time than third-strikers, but when people talk about the policy of reforming three strikes, nobody wants to touch the second strike.”
Jeanne Woodford, a former Corrections Department chief … said the “three strikes” law has unquestionably helped drive the state’s prison crowding and spending problems…. “Some of these guys are literally serving 60, 70 years—more time than three-strikers,” she said. “The bottom line is that we really do need to look at our sentences. They are just so all over the place that people could commit a very serious crime and get less time than a second-striker who did something far less serious. To be a deterrent, the sentencing system has to be consistent.”