ABSTRACT
As they have done many times in the past, Peter Greenwood and his colleagues (Greenwood, Rydell, and Chiesa 1996) at RAND have succeeded in opening up a brand new discussion of a set of issues that had been prematurely pushed to the side by public and political opinion. In several recent papers and in this current presentation, the RAND group reviewed the history of the Three Strikes legislation in California and conducted analyses of its probable costs and effectiveness (Greenwood, Rydell, Abrahamse, Caulkins, Chiesa, Model and Klein 1994). The researchers concluded that when the program is fully implemented, serious crime will be reduced by up to 25 percent, at a cost of about $16,000 per crime prevented.
