In the five years since "three strikes" laws swept the nation, most states don't even use them.
There are, of course, some big exceptions: California has put away more than 40,000 people for second and third strikes since the law passed in 1994 -- a quarter of the state's prison population. Of those, 4,400 were sentenced to 25 years to life. And Georgia has sentenced nearly 2,000 under its law.But in most places, the laws are written more narrowly and are rarely applied. Most of the 23 states that adopted the laws in the 1990s have put no more than a half-dozen people behind bars under the statutes, which create long and usually mandatory sentences for criminals who commit new offenses.
"It went a long way on a catchy title," said D. Alan Henry, a criminal justice researcher who has written about the "three strikes" movement. "Contrary to what legislatures thought, there weren't awful numbers of people who had committed heinous crimes and were released and then came back and were treated lightly."
Critics say this is proof that the laws were never really needed and were crafted by conservatives trying to look tough on crime.
Washington state, where the first such law passed in 1993, has put more than 120 people behind bars for life without parole.
Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin each have no more than six people locked up under "three strikes"-type laws. Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Nevada and South Carolina are the other states with such laws.
Because the laws are used so sparingly, most "three strikes" states haven't studied their effect on state finances or repeat crime.
Before "three strikes" laws, most states had "habitual offender" statutes aimed at repeat offenders. But those laws weren't as strong and were often decades old and had fallen into disuse.
Even now, prosecutors still have the ability in "three strikes" cases to plea-bargain the charges down, just as they did before.