It's only the early innings. But the rage to lock up the chronically rotten and throw away the key - "three strikes and you're out!" - is having scant effect in most states.
With the big exception of California - where more than 700 people are now in prison under "three strikes" sentences - these laws are seldom invoked a year or more after taking effect, The Associated Press has found.Some states do not track their "three strikes" cases. A few are barely dry on the page: Arkansas' law took effect in late July while South Carolina's starts Jan. 1.
But Washington state cases totaled just 33 nearly two years after passage of a law expected to bring in 40-75 a year. And by mid-September in Colorado, North Carolina and Tennessee, not a single person had been incarcerated under their "three strikes" laws, officials reported. Wisconsin had one, Indiana fewer than 10.
Georgia's 9-month-old "two strikes" netted one lifer. The federal government invoked its own "three strikes" law and got five convictions.
This isn't what many voters envisioned when they demanded action on crime. Since Washington voters gave an enthusiastic nod to a 1993 ballot measure making theirs the first "three strikes" state, 17 other states have enacted such laws; Alaska, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania will consider them soon.
The laws differ markedly state to state. In fact, they might be more accurately called "two, three or four strikes" laws.
Some allow parole. Not all are mandatory. And the criminals they aim to snare range widely, from just about any felon in California to the lone category of sex offenders who prey on children in Texas.
In North Carolina, said Colon Willoughby, prosecutor for Wake County, the law is so narrowly written it omits such violent crimes as armed muggings, armed assault on a police officer and sex abuse of a minor.
Willoughby just saw what looked like his state's first potential "three strikes" defendant skip bail. The man was facing trial for attempted murder after previous convictions for manslaughter and armed assault.
"The ordinary citizen on the street may have expected it to be applicable to lots of folks," Willoughby said.
For instance, "it's not usual to convict someone three times for violent rape . . . Those people that commit those types of crimes are not likely to be paroled" in the first place, he said.
Said Pamela Lattimore, a program manager at the National Institute of Justice, the U.S. Justice Department's research arm: "What people don't understand is that most of the horrible offenders get long sentences anyway."
Indeed, long before politicians used "three strikes" to pitch justice with a baseball slogan, most states already had habitual offender laws that stiffen penalties with each new conviction.
That explains Colorado's lack of use for its "three strikes" law, according to Bonnie Benedetti, Denver assistant district attorney.
"We already had an habitual criminal system in place," Benedetti said. "We used that with good success. We may well get very lengthy prison sentences (for repeat offenders) before they get all the way to `three strikes, and you're out.' "
Alabama has been locking up repeat offenders for life under a 1979 law with questionable results.
Alabama mandates a life sentence on a fourth, violent crime for defendants after three previous felony convictions.
The 386 Alabama inmates serving life without parole as of the end of July, the latest available figure, constituted just under 2 percent of the prison population of about 20,000.
Meanwhile, violent crime in the state has risen 23 percent in the past five years. Property crime is up 9 percent.
"The public thinks they're getting something for it and they're being deceived by the legislators who use this rhetoric to just get re-elected," said Judge Braxton Kittrell, chief judge of Circuit Court in Mobile, the state's second-largest metropolitan area.
"Our crime rate hasn't gone down because of the Habitual Offender Act," Kittrell said. "The advice I would give: Keep judicial discretion involved so you can have a balanced sentencing. You can't have cold, hard rules."
He cited the case of a chronic shoplifter who snatched something from a convenience store and drew a knife on his way out the door.
The knife put the crime in the violent category and the thief went to prison for life, a punishment that seemed hardly to fit the crime - and penalized the taxpayers, as well, Kittrell suggested. "People want to lock 'em up and throw the key away until you tell them what the cost is."
And the cost is becoming apparent in California.
California, home to 12 percent of the U.S. population - or just under one in eight Americans - now requires life sentences for any felony that follows two convictions for serious or violent crimes.
As a result, California prisons took in 713 men and women on third-strike convictions between March 1994, when the law took effect, and the end of August, latest figures show.
Enacted by the Legislature and then for good measure by voter referendum, "three strikes" is hitting California's justice system like no quake that ever throttled that state.
State studies already show jail populations growing. Potential three-strikers are demanding trials instead of pleading guilty. Counties are freeing some inmates early to make room for three-strikers. "Three strikes" inmates are getting assigned to higher security facilities.
And a new phrase heard in California courthouses is: "strike a strike," meaning subtracting infractions to lower the "three strikes" count.
Say someone stole for food. "We will strike a strike," said Gregory McClain, deputy district attorney for San Diego County, which created an entire segment of its justice system to handle "three strikes" defendants.
"In one case, I struck two strikes," McClain said. "It was a guy who had a tough record a long time ago. He had a child. He had a wife. He had a city or county job. He was paying child support, paying alimony. His employer said he was doing a good job."
The man had been picked up for driving under the influence of the hallucinogen PCP.