The prisons are overcrowded...so anybody who finds themselves serving a 10 year+ sentence has probably committed multiple offenses, and pled them down, before finally accumulating so many strikes that it was no longer in the judge’s hands.
IOW, these guys are hardened criminals.
Exactly. There was a big study done recently about who actually gets sent to prison for drug offenses. It isn’t the innocent hippy peddling a little marijuana to his friends. These are the hard core.
One of these stupid stories talked about some poor guy now doing life because of a “minor drug violation” and how he should be let out as a non-violent offender. (And it was all because he had previously been convicted of other “unrelated crimes,” which somehow the article never identifies.) When you do a little sleuthing, however, you find out he had priors for things like drug manufacturing, armed robbery, assault, etc.
The whole point of “3 strikes” was to stop the revolving door and to get these guys off the streets permanently or to stop their behavior.
And by the way, it works. I was once involved in a case where the environmental opponents hired a rent-a-mob to disrupt the client’s activities. One day I was on the site, and one of the leaders of the rent-a-mob started making all sorts of threats to me. Standing right next to me was an undercover cop; the cop leans over and whispers in my ear not to worry about the guy, he wouldn’t carry through on this threats because he’s had two strikes already (for commercial marijuana cultivation and distribution, ironically) and if he does anything else he was going away permanently—so the guy wasn’t about to step over that line.