Baseball and criminal sentencing are different things, and they should be treated that way. But since 1993, California and 22 other states have adopted so-called "three strikes" laws, under which someone convicted of a third felony faces life in prison.

Of those 23 states, California is the only one that allows nonviolent and less-serious offenses to be included as the third strike that triggers 25-years to life sentence.

As a result of California's failure to distinguish between triggering offenses, there are now 8,700 inmates serving life in this state under the three-strikes law. Over half of these inmates are there for offenses that were not violent or serious felonies. Even shoplifting can be made the basis for a third strike, if the person convicted of shoplifting has a prior record of petty theft.

It is of course very expensive - upwards of $40,000 per year - to imprison so many people so indiscriminately for so long. And the impact on public safety is dubious at best. The consensus among many criminologists is that there is no statistical evidence that three-strikes laws actually bring down the crime rate.

This doesn't mean that California's law is easy to change. Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley found that out in 2006, when he worked with a state senator on a bill to amend the law. The proposed bill would have required that the third strike be either a violent or serious felony. It would also have taken certain lower-level offenses, such as petty theft and small-scale drug possession, off of the list of strikes.

The bill died in the state senate, however, and Californians are still stuck with a law that Stanford law professor Michael Romano calls "the worst criminal law in the country."

Source: "Politics of 'three strikes' law," SF Gate, 5-8-11