David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

weren’t thinking that far ahead.
    The murder of his daughter made Reynolds want to put the fear of God into California’s would-be criminals—to make them think twice before crossing the line. But that strategy doesn’t work if criminals think like this. Joe Davis and Douglas Walker—the two thugs who cornered Kimber Reynolds outside the Daily Planet—were crystal-meth addicts. Earlier that day, they had attempted a carjacking in broad daylight. And remember what Walker said? I wasn’t really thinking much a nothing, you know. When it happens, it happens, you know. It just happened suddenly. We were just out doing what we do. I mean, that’s all I can tell you. Is this the sort of person to think twice?
    “I’ve talked to family friends who knew Joe and his brother, and they asked him why he shot Kimber,” Reynolds once said, looking back on that tragic evening. “And he said that he already had the purse, so that wasn’t an issue. But that he’d shot her, instead, because of the way she was looking at him. He shot her because he didn’t think she was taking him seriously, and wasn’t giving him any respect.” Reynolds’s own words contradict the logic of Three Strikes. Joe Davis killed Kimber Reynolds because she would not give him the respect he thought he deserved as he held a gun to her head and grabbed at her purse. How on earth does changing the severity of punishment deter someone whose brain works like that? You and I are sensitive to increased punishment, because you and I are people with a stake in society. But criminals aren’t. As the criminologist David Kennedy writes: “It may simply be that those who stand ready today to take a chance, often on impulse, often while impaired, on what they view as a very small likelihood of an already very serious sanction will stand ready tomorrow to take the same chance on what they still view as a very small likelihood of a somewhat more serious sanction.” 2
    The second argument for Three Strikes—that every extra year a criminal is behind bars is another year he can’t commit a crime—is just as problematic. The math doesn’t add up. The average age of a California criminal in 2011 at the moment he was convicted of his Third Strike offense, for example, was forty-three. Before Three Strikes came along, that man might have served something like five years for a typical felony and been released at the age of forty-eight. With Three Strikes, he would serve, at minimum, twenty-five years—and get out at sixty-eight. Logically, the question to ask is: How many crimes do criminals commit between the ages of forty-eight and sixty-eight? Not that many. Take a look at the following graphs, which show the relationship between age and crime both for aggravated assault and murder and for robbery and burglary.

    Longer sentences work on young men. But once someone passes that crucial midtwenties mark, all longer sentences do is protect us from dangerous criminals at the point that they become less dangerous. Once again, what starts out as a promising strategy stops working.
    Now for the crucial question: Is there a right side to the crime-and-punishment curve—a point where cracking down starts to actually make things worse ? The criminologist who has made this argument most persuasively is Todd Clear, and his reasoning goes something like this:
    Prison has a direct effect on crime: it puts a bad person behind bars, where he can’t victimize anyone else. But it also has an indirect effect on crime, in that it affects all the people with whom that criminal comes into contact. A very high number of the men who get sent to prison, for example, are fathers. (One-fourth of juveniles convicted of crimes have children.) And the effect on a child of having a father sent away to prison is devastating. Some criminals are lousy fathers: abusive, volatile, absent. But many are not. Their earnings—both from crime and legal jobs—help support their families. For a child, losing a father to prison is an undesirable difficulty. Having a parent incarcerated increases a child’s chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.
    Once the criminal has served his time, he returns to his old neighborhood. There’s a good chance he’s been psychologically damaged by his time behind bars. His employment prospects have plummeted. While in prison, he’s lost many of his noncriminal