October began with blood on the ground. In late September, a gunman killed himself and one of the hostages he had taken at a Colorado high school. Days later, a Wisconsin teen brought a shotgun and a .22-caliber pistol to his high school and killed the school’s principal. Shortly afterward on Oct. 3, a man barricaded himself in a Pennsylvania school with an arsenal of weapons, eventually killing five girls and himself.
Only two days later, a Wisconsin state legislator proposed that the state offer firearms and training for its teachers, setting off a national debate — and rightly so. While such reactionary measures may make us feel safer, they typically do very little to warrant these feelings. “Like overweight people looking for a fat-burning pill,” Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote of the legislation, “we want magic solutions that require no investment of time, tears or tolerance.”
The Wisconsin bill is by no means the first knee-jerk bill to make it into a state legislature. Fueled by public outrage at the rape and murder of 8-year-old Megan Nicole Kanka by her neighbor Jesse Timmendaques — a previously convicted sex offender — federal legislators quickly passed Megan’s Law in 1996 to help states track sex criminals. And when 12-year-old Polly Klass was kidnapped and murdered by a released inmate, California passed its “three strikes” law, designed to keep repeat criminals off the street. But unfortunately, neither law has achieved what it set out to accomplish.
Megan’s Law stipulates that everyone has the right to know if a convicted sex offender moves into the neighborhood. It requires that states develop a procedure for notifying the public when a person convicted of certain crimes is released near their homes. In California, a public database lists convicted sex offenders so that anyone can identify and locate them.
But the law has been heavily criticized by police officers, prosecutors and victims’ rights advocates, who say that the law is not harsh enough and gives people a false sense of security. Parental knowledge of the number and location of convicted sex offenders in an area does not prevent those offenders from committing another crime. More importantly, the overwhelming majority of sexually assaulted minors were victimized by a family member or acquaintance, according to Bureau of Justice statistics. The database isn’t really effective then, because it cannot prevent the vast majority of sex crimes from happening.
Furthermore, the database includes those who have been convicted of consensual crimes — such as public nudity, streaking, skinny-dipping, public urination, mooning, sodomy and adultery — in addition to sexual predators. In addition to creating the false impression that children are safer, Megan’s Law also wrongly shames some who don’t necessarily fit into the “dangerous sex offender” category. Most importantly, the law does very little to ensure that sex offenders will never commit crimes again.
Similarly, California’s three strikes law only gives the illusion that crime rates — and more specifically the repetition of criminal behavior — are actually falling.
The three strikes law in California followed one year after a similar bill was passed in Washington state after the murder of Diane Ballaslotes, who was killed by a convicted rapist released from prison. After Klass’ murder, California wrote its own version, which proposed a term of life imprisonment without possibility of parole for persons convicted for the third time of certain specific violent or serious felonies. The measure passed with an overwhelming 72-percent majority, and by 2004, 26 states and the federal government had laws that satisfy the general criteria for designation as “three strikes” statutes.
But the laws have little effect on public safety. In 1999, George Washington University researcher James Austin examined the effectiveness of the law in his article “The Impact of ‘Three Strikes’ and You’re Out,” and concluded that after examining California counties that used different applications of the law, he found similar pre- and post-reform crime rates regardless of the county’s policy of prosecuting strike cases.
“Failure … to either deter or incapacitate the high rate offender is limited to an inability to target high-risk offenders or to impose or create the perception of imposition of the law in a swift and equitable manner,” Austin wrote.
Because three strikes laws apply to such a small proportion of the criminal population, they cannot be credited for reducing crime and repeat offender rates. In California, crime was going down before the law took effect, and has continued to decline at the same rate. And three strikes laws have problems of their own: often the third and final offense is relatively minor compared to the first two, but the offender nonetheless ends up in the slammer for life.
While Megan’s Law and the three strikes statutes may have made us feel better in the heat of the moment after appalling crimes, neither has accomplished its initial goals. And in the wake of the horrific instances of gun violence in schools across the country, we must tread carefully before rushing to pass reactionary laws that do little to address the root causes of the problem.
Legislation drafted in the light of one or a few specific tragic cases often fails to solve the large and complex underlying issues — and lulls us into complacency with the feeling that we’ve accomplished something. We deserve better from our lawmakers.
