RT Article
T1 How Large Should the Strike Zone Be in “Three Strikes and You're Out” Sentencing Laws?
JF Journal of quantitative criminology
VO 17
IS 3
SP 227
OP 246
A1 Caulkins, Jonathan P. 1965-
LA English
YR 2001
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1764280695
AB So-called “three strikes and you're out” sentencing laws for criminal offenders have proliferated in the United States. The laws vary considerably in their definitions of what constitutes a “strike.” This paper adapts the classic Poisson process model of criminal offending to investigate how varying sentence lengths and definitions of what constitutes a strike affect the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of these sentencing laws. In particular, it asks whether, by using different definitions for the first, second, and third strikes or different sentence lengths, one can make the resulting incarceration more “efficient” in the sense of incapacitating more crimes per cell-year served.
K1 Incapacitation
K1 cost-effectiveness
K1 Three Strikes
K1 Sentencing
DO 10.1023/A:1011098100458