McFreedom

One of my brothers, a non-Californian, says, in a comment to the propositions guide, he is:

[C]urious about the cost of the three strikes law. Given the budget issues in CA, it might be worth reducing the amount of non-violent three strikes violators in order to save money.

Well, the legislative analyst says it would initially save "tens of millions" and eventually might save "hundreds of millions" of dollars. But it also comes with significant costs in the "tens of millions" range, as current prisoners are resentenced. Also, it's worth noting that the whole theory behind "three strikes" is that people who have gone to prison three times are probably going to go to prison four times, so rather than incurring the costs on society and law enforcement in finding them again, let's just hang on to them. I would be very surprised if the net cost to the state (even leaving aside the societal cost of the new crimes) is positive when you take this into account.

It's also worth noting that, as the Secretary of State's office says, "As of April 2004, there were about 163,000 inmates in California prisons, as well as some state-contracted facilities. The costs to operate the state prison system in 2004-05 are estimated to be approximately $5.7 billion." Even if you grant them $300M/year in savings (which I'm highly skeptical of), you're only cutting the prison budget by 5%. I'd be a lot more interested in a bill to decriminalize drugs and let out the 35,000 drug offenders (of 157,000 total prisoners in 2002) than sweating the maybe 3,500 third-strikers this would let out, many (most?) of whom are just going to come back in a few years.