Makes perfect sense when you have self-interested parties (law enforcement, for-profit prisons, prosecutors, etc.) who benefit from the volume.
We made it profitable to criminalize people.
Moreover, for-profit prisons barely existed in the early 1990's when states like California and Washington started passing three strikes laws. Law enforcement, prison unions, private prisons, etc, have definitely benefited from these things, but the actual policies arose from public outrage in the 1980's and 1990's about the government being "soft on crime." For example, either California's law was passed on the back of public outrage at the murder of Polly Klass.
One bit of context that's lost in current discussions is how much consternation existed in the 1980's and 1990's about crime. If you look at the media from the time, there is a ton of hand-wringing about criminals being let out early on parole or clearly guilty people getting acquitted "on a technicality" (usually a 4th amendment violation).
A movie that captures the zeitgeist of the time is the 1983 movie Star Chamber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Chamber: "Judge Steven Hardin (Michael Douglas) is an idealistic Los Angeles jurist who gets frustrated when the technicalities of the law prevent the prosecution of two men who are accused of raping and killing a 10-year-old boy. They were driving slowly late at night and attracted the suspicion of two police officers, who wondered if the van's occupants might be burglars. After checking the license plate for violations, the policemen pulled them over for expired paperwork, claimed to have smelled marijuana, then saw a bloody shoe inside the van. However, the paperwork was actually submitted on time (it was merely processed late), meaning the police had no reason to pull over the van and Hardin has no choice (see fruit of the poisonous tree) but to throw out any subsequently discovered evidence, i.e. the bloody shoe. Hardin is even more distraught when the father of the boy attempts to shoot the criminals in court but misses and shoots a cop instead. Subsequently, the father commits suicide while in jail only after he informs Hardin that another boy has been discovered raped and murdered and tells him "This one is on you, your Honor. That boy would be alive if you hadn't let those men go." After hearing all this, Judge Hardin approaches his friend, Judge Caulfield (Hal Holbrook), who tells him of a modern-day Star Chamber: a group of judges who identify criminals who fell through the judicial system's cracks and then take actions against them outside the legal structure."
"In Louisiana, people with as few as two prior nonviolent felony convictions can face mandatory life imprisonment on charges as minor as possession of a syringe containing heroin residue or, until recently, possession of a single joint."
There's no way not to have a large reaction to such a dramatic increase.
my plot from the wikipedia data available [1]:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
Bad laws are quickly removed from the books. Unless someone is pocketing money.
> Law enforcement, prison unions, private prisons, etc, have definitely benefited from these things
Yup.
> One bit of context that's lost in current discussions is how much consternation existed in the 1980's and 1990's about crime.
I remember. As I mentioned, policies tend to change with the mood ... unless someone is making money off of the previous policies.
Laws of any kind, good or bad, are rarely removed from the books.
Non-violent crimes have been a concept long before someone stood to make money off them. (Of course, that doesn't imply that they make sense.)
This was not the approach taken with Al Capone.
Perhaps more importantly, if Wikipedia's account is to be believed, he lost the tax evasion case because he had bad lawyers: first, one who admitted to the facts of the crime, and second, an initial defense team who didn't raise objections they could have raised. So I don't think the Capone example contradicts my claims in the end. We need defense lawyers for actual, unquestionable criminals because they have the singular goal of making sure people aren't unfairly or vindictively prosecuted. We understand that having just a prosecutor and a judge risks unjust outcomes. So it's unsurprising that wasn't the passive-voice "approach taken" with him: a trial without good defense is expected not to lead to a just approach, just as much as a trial without good prosecution or a good judge.
At best it's not clear what your point is or what position you're espousing, which I think is a mostly valid reason for downvote-and-move-on. For instance, it's not clear whether you think the prosecution of Capone was just or unjust.
I don't see why this makes the comment less worthwhile. I think going for Al Capone that way was a terrible idea, but you seem to have changed your own mind in the other direction based on my viewpoint-free comment. (At least, that's what I get from "I'm not sure that I think a seven-year sentence would have really been sufficient for the fullness of his crimes".) I highlighted a point from your comment and pointed out that a lot of people don't share that value at all; I think that's worth noting regardless of whether your ultimate conclusion is "hmm, Al Capone illustrates that only punishing people for the crimes they committed is a bad idea" or "the US justice system has been going downhill since the early 20th century, but I wish people would come to their senses".
I think I'm actually more worried about the loss of this than the loss of innocence-until-proven-guilty. That's the sort of stuff that gets people thinking, if you don't want to be extrajudicially killed on the streets, don't sell untaxed goods if you have asthma.