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

friends and replaced them with fellow-criminal friends. And now he’s back, placing even more strain emotionally and financially on the home that he shattered by leaving in the first place. Incarceration creates collateral damage. In most cases, the harm done by imprisonment is smaller than the benefits; we’re still better off for putting people behind bars. But Clear’s point is that if you lock up too many people for too long, the collateral damage starts to outweigh the benefit. 3
    Clear and a colleague—Dina Rose—tested his hypothesis in Tallahassee, Florida. 4 They went across the city and compared the number of people sent to prison in a given neighborhood in one year with the crime rate in that same neighborhood the following year—and tried to estimate, mathematically, if there was a point where the inverted-U curve starts to turn. They found it. “If more than two percent of the neighborhood goes to prison,” Clear concluded, “the effect on crime starts to reverse.”
    This is what Jaffe was talking about in Brownsville. The damage she was trying to repair with her hugs and turkeys wasn’t caused by an absence of law and order. It was caused by too much law and order: so many fathers and brothers and cousins in prison that people in the neighborhood had come to see the law as their enemy. Brownsville was on the right side of the inverted U. In California in 1989, there were seventy-six thousand people behind bars. Ten years later, largely because of Three Strikes, that number had more than doubled. On a per capita basis, by the turn of the twenty-first century, California had between five and eight times as many people in prison as did Canada or Western Europe. Don’t you think it’s possible that Three Strikes turned some neighborhoods in California into the equivalent of Brownsville?
    Reynolds is convinced that his crusade saved six lives a day, because crime rates came tumbling down in California after Three Strikes was passed. But upon closer examination, it turns out that those reductions started before Three Strikes went into effect. And while crime rates came tumbling down in California in the 1990s, they also came tumbling down in many other parts of the United States in the same period, even in places that didn’t crack down on crime at all. The more Three Strikes was studied, the more elusive its effects were seen to be. Some criminologists concluded that it did lower crime. Others said that it worked but that the money spent on locking criminals up would have been better spent elsewhere. One recent study says that Three Strikes brought down the overall level of crime but, paradoxically, increased the number of violent crimes. Perhaps the largest group of studies can find no effect at all, and there is even a set of studies that argue that Three Strikes raised crime rates. 5 The state of California conducted the greatest penal experiment in American history, and after twenty years and tens of billions of dollars, nobody could ascertain whether that experiment did any good. 6 In November of 2012, California finally gave up. In a state referendum, the law was radically scaled back. 7

4.
    Wilma Derksen was at home, trying to clean up the family room in the basement, when her daughter Candace called. It was a Friday afternoon in November, a decade before Kimber Reynolds walked out of her parents’ home for the last time. The Derksens lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on the prairies of central Canada, and at that time of year, the temperature outside was well below freezing. Candace was thirteen. She was giggling, flirting with a young boy from her school. She wanted her mother to come and pick her up. Wilma did a series of calculations in her head. The Derksens had one car. Wilma had to pick up her husband, Cliff, from work. But he wouldn’t be finished for another hour. She had two other children—a two-year-old and a nine-year-old. She could hear them quarreling in the other room. She would have to bundle them up first, pick up Candace, then go and pick up her husband. It would be an hour in the car with three hungry children. There was a bus. Candace was thirteen, no longer a child. The house was a mess.
    “Candace, do you have money for the bus?”
    “Yup.”
    “I can’t pick you up,” her mother said.
    Derksen returned to her vacuuming. She folded laundry. She bustled about. Then she stopped. Something seemed wrong. She looked at the clock. Candace should have been home by