"THREE STRIKES: THE UNINTENDED VICTIMS"


    (("Three Strikes: The Unintended Victims" is a report issued
    Oct.  18, 1994, by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal
    Justice in San Francisco. The report profiles 10 people
    facing sentences of at least 25 years to life under
    California's new "three strikes and you're out" legislation.
    The 10 subjects are all nonviolent offenders swept up in a
    net that the authors contend was designed to snare more
    dangerous violent criminals. The profiles are based on court
    records and interviews with the offenders, their victims and
    families, friends and teachers, lawyers and parole officers.
    The authors are Vincent Schiraldi, the center's executive
    director; Peter Y. Sussman, a longtime San Francisco
    journalist and co-author of _Committing Journalism: The
    Prison Writings of Red Hog_ (W.W. Norton, 1993); and Lanric
    Hyland, former director of special projects for the Santa
    Clara County Department of Correction in California.))


 Introduction:
 The People Behind the Headlines

 With speed rarely seen in the legislative process, California's
 lawmakers last March enacted a harsh new system of criminal
 punishment that will sweep thousands of people a year into
 prison for decades, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of
 dollars for each of them. Many of these men and women surely
 deserve severe punishment. But because of the "three strikes"
 law's simplistic, arithmetical formulae -- based on a metaphor
 borrowed from baseball -- many people will be sent to prison who
 may not merit such punishment. The Center on Juvenile and
 Criminal Justice set out to find and profile some of these
 people.  We thought their stories would help to ground the
 current criminal-justice debate by shifting the focus from
 arithmetic to real people.

 The victims of crime, no less than the public at large, deserve
 an accountability based on actual circumstances. Neither
 criminal nor victim is a metaphor. After all, the public's
 indiscriminate anger was provoked by the tragic murder of a real
 person. But the politicians' response extended far beyond that
 unspeakable act. Many unintended victims were caught in the net.

 It was just a year ago that Polly Klaas, an innocent 12-year-old
 girl, was kidnapped during a slumber party at her home in
 Petaluma, Calif. She was subsequently murdered. That vicious
 crime, and the desperate search for the girl, drew national
 attention. For weeks before and after the capture of Richard
 Allen Davis, her confessed killer, the Polly Klaas kidnap-murder
 case made front-page headlines and top-of-the-hour bulletins.

 After the capture and immediate confession of Davis, a repeat
 felon with prior convictions for burglary and kidnapping, the
 case became an icon for what is wrong with the criminal justice
 system in California and across America.  California's governor
 and senior senator gave speeches at Polly's memorial service,
 and President Clinton singled out her tragic case for mention
 during his "State of the Union" address. "Leniency,"
 "soft-headedness," and "mollycoddling convicts" were all blamed
 for a plague of crime that the public percieved was engulfing
 the nation. And tough, no-nonsense, inflexible sanctions were
 seized upon as the panacea.  	 At the same time, Mike Reynolds
 -- a photographer from Fresno whose daughter had also been
 killed -- was spearheading a then-fledgling movement to pass a
 rigid habitual offender act in California through both the
 legislative and initiative process. Several attempts to pass
 Reynolds' law had failed in legislative committees, and Governor
 Wilson had consistently refused to support the law prior to
 Polly Klaas' kidnapping. The act had been dubbed "three strikes
 and you're out" by the National Rifle Association, its primary
 promoter nationally, because of a provision requiring life
 prison terms for defendants convicted of any felony who had
 already been convicted of two purportedly "serious" or "violent"
 felonies.  
	 The stage was set for the meteoric rise in
 popularity of the legislation with the catchy baseball name and
 the financial backing of the powerful NRA. It was presented as
 an all-or-nothing nostrum. Few stopped to read the fine print.
 Within weeks, almost every major candidate for governor,
 senator, and attorney general from both parties endorsed the
 "three strikes" law, as did members of the grieving Klaas
 family. The public opinion polls, now showing crime as the No. 1
 voter concern, were running 8 to 1 in favor of the state's
 newest crime-control cure-all. On March 7, 1994, following a
 special session of the Legislature on crime, Assembly Bill 971
 -- "three strikes and you're out" -- was signed into law by
 Governor Wilson.  That same day, enough signatures were
 submitted to the California secretary of state to qualify an
 initiative identical to AB 971 for placement on the November
 ballot in California as Proposition 184. 
 	 But in the interval between the rise of the "three strikes" 
concept, its signing into law, and the present day, Californians have had an
 unprecedented opportunity to examine both the "diagnosis" that
 gave rise to the law and the legislative "cure" that "three
 strikes" represents. The Klaas family, along with many
 legislators who voted for the law, have recanted their support.
 Virtually every major newspaper in the state that extensively
 covered the kidnapping of Polly Klaas has now taken a position
 in opposition to the "three strikes" initiative. Poll results
 are running 2 to 1 in favor of the law, although 85 percent of
 respondents express a desire to have a "violent crime-only"
 proposition as an option on the ballot.
 	With the intensive electoral scrutiny, two underpinnings of the
 "three strikes" law have been called into serious question: the
 contention that California has been reluctant to punish its
 offenders and the notion that crime is rising out of control.
 Since 1977, when California had 19,000 inmates in its prison
 system, the California Legislature has passed more than 1,000
 bills lengthening sentences or defining new crimes, often in
 response to high-profile offenders such as Davis. The result has
 been a more-than-sixfold increase to today's population of
 126,000. Between 1852 and 1984, California built 12 prisons.
 Since just 1984, California has constructed an additional 16
 prisons.  
	 But during the decade and a half that imprisonment
 was soaring, the crime rate in California has stubbornly refused
 to budge, hovering today at approximately the 1977 rate. Indeed,
 during 1993 and the first half of 1994, the rate of both violent
 and property crime actually fell while public fear of crime
 inexplicably rose. A study by the Center for Media and Public
 Affairs in Washington, D.C., suggests one possible reason for
 such a paradox. The study shows that, while the murder rate
 nationally remained stable between 1992 and 1993, the number of
 homicides reported on the evening news of the nation's three
 major networks tripled. Not surprisingly, the report continues,
 from May 1992 to February 1993, there a sixfold increase in the
 number of Americans who rated crime as the country's most
 important problem.
  	 This governance by hyperbole is having
 dramatic and often skewed effects on criminal justice policy
 setting. As a victim of violent crime myself, I recognize that
 if I had the opportunity to set criminal justice policy 10
 minutes after I was mugged, it would have been lousy public
 policy.  Alternatively, it is obvious that, as long as the
 public believes that Richard Allen Davis is representative of
 the typical California inmate, no progress will ever be made in
 setting rational criminal justice policy in this state.  	 The
 attempt to demonize crime suspects was well demonstrated in
 something we encountered while investigating "three-strike"
 cases around the state. We learned that those Stanislaus County
 jail inmates charged with "third-strike" offenses are clothed in
 special canary-yellow jumpsuits to distinguish them from
 run-of-the-mill inmates. In effect, this creates a class of
 criminals so horrible that they must bear a special mark of
 shame even before they are brought to trial. We were not able to
 find a reasonable rationale for such official scapegoating, yet
 the attitude behind this sartorial decision is in many ways a
 metaphor for the "three-strike" law itself.  The individuals
 whose lives and cases are profiled in this report won't make the
 evening news or the front pages of the local paper. Their
 stories may come as a surprise to some observers, but for most
 of us who practice in the criminal justice system every day,
 they are just what we expected. These are the cases that fill
 the court dockets day after day. That's why we decided to
 undertake this study.  
	 Dale Broyles, for example, is a
 25-year-old man who is charged with being an ex-felon in
 possession of a weapon.  Broyles was deposited -- drunk and
 unconscious -- into the back seat of his car by some of his
 friends to sleep off his evening binge. The next morning, after
 his car was repossessed with him still sleeping in it, Broyles
 was brought to the attention of the sheriff's deputies by a
 startled repo man. While attempting to awaken Broyles, deputies
 noted a gun in the vehicle's front seat (which Broyles and other
 witnesses claim is not Broyles') and arrested him.  

 	Or Edward Morrison, a parole violator serving a six-month term in state
 prison for testing positive for drug use. With slightly more
 than one month left to serve on this violation, the mentally
 disturbed Morrison walked out of the minimum-security prison in
 which he was confined. He was apprehended less than 12 hours
 later in the process of applying for a job at a gas station.  	
 Then there are those facing decades in prison for petty theft,
 the most commonly committed and least frequently publicized
 offense in California. Eddie Jordan stole a new shirt from a
 J.C. Penney's store that he intended to wear at a job interview.
 Juan Muro attempted to steal wooden pallets from a parking lot
 to burn at a beach bonfire for the birthday party of a friend's
 son. Vincent Delgado and Clarence Malbrough stole less than $90
 worth of items from chain stores; both had longtime heroin
 addictions. Duane Silva and Ricky Spahn are both borderline
 mentally retarded defendants charged with property crimes.
 Michael Garcia stole a package of chuck steaks to feed his
 family. And Kendall Cooke shoplifted one can of beer from a
 7-Eleven store.
  	 Together, these eight defendants stole $8,000
 in goods. It will take only 15 days before the taxpayers' bill
 for their collective imprisonment exceeds that amount. Each of
 the 10 defendants profiled in this report is facing a life
 sentence. None of the 10 men was ever accused of physically
 harming a victim. 
 	 In this report, we chose to profile only
 people facing life sentences because that is the part of the
 legislation that has captured the public imagination.  However,
 there are thousands of defendants facing sentencing under the
 "second strike" provision who could just as easily have been
 included. Many asked not to be included in this study because
 they feared offending district attorneys, who are the only
 officials with the power to plea bargain on "three-strike" cases
 by ignoring prior offenses. It is a power that even the judges
 are apparently not permitted under the legislation, thereby
 granting traditionally judicial discretion to prosecutors.  One
 defendant we interviewed, Steve Percelle, stole a grocery cart
 full of groceries and liquor after he lost his job, in order to
 pay for medicine for his 2-month-old asthmatic son. Charged
 originally with a third "strike," the assistant district
 attorney in charge of the county's "three strikes screening
 team" decided to ignore one of Percelle's prior convictions
 after the media took an interest in his case. Percelle will
 instead spend four years in prison for that offense, over the
 objection of four of the assistant district attorneys on the
 county screening team who still wanted the life term.
  	 There is a temptation to view these cases as oddities. But evidence is
 mounting statewide that such cases are becoming commonplace.
 According to the Los Angeles district attorney's office, 75
 percent of the "third-strike" cases their office is now being
 compelled by the "three strikes" law to prosecute are
 non-violent and non-serious.  No defendants in their right mind
 will plead guilty to a life term for a case that six months ago
 would have carried a short jail term. The Santa Clara County
 Executive's Office has estimated that jury trials there will
 triple over the next year alone because of the "three strikes"
 law. Civil courts in Los Angeles have already been closed
 repeatedly to handle the "three strikes" overload from criminal
 courts. 
 	 Clearly, to dub this group of defendants "the gang
 that couldn't shoot straight" would be to elevate their level of
 criminal sophistication. The Center on Juvenile and Criminal
 Justice undertook this study with the hope that these case
 histories would educate the public about the real lives of real
 defendants churning daily through our criminal justice system.
 Voters may read this and still feel that these men (and the
 women whose cases we were unable to profile) deserve life
 imprisonment. As researchers, we felt it our responsibility
 amidst the current criminal justice feeding frenzy to put a
 human face on the "three strikes" law.
 	Through a quirk of legislative history, Californians have a rare
 opportunity to see in operation a sentencing system they are
 about to vote on. That system appears to us to need greater
 scrutiny. It is our hope that in considering this issue, voters
 will evaluate the experiences of real people rather than
 stereotypical desperadoes shrouded in the campaign rhetoric of
 fear and vengeance.  If there is a lesson to be learned from the
 stories we present here, it's a message far older than Gilbert
 and Sullivan's "Mikado," where it was so catchily phrased: Let
 the punishment fit the crime.


 -- Vincent Schiraldi, executive director
 Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
 October 1994


 #   #   #

  State Senator Tom Hayden, then a candidate for the Democratic
 gubernatorial nomination, is the only exception to this list.
 The deadline for placing new propositions on the ballot has
 passed.


                  =================================



 DUANE SILVA
 Charge: Residential burglary
 Value of stolen goods: $1855 (VCR, jewelry and coins)

 Baudelia Silva leans forward, crying, gesturing, pleading, the
 words tumbling out one on top of the other, some in English, some
 in Spanish. She is trying to get someone to understand what she
 has told so many officials over the years:  Her son, Duane, has
 "a head sickness ... loco ... he is mentally wrong." In prison,
 she says, "what will happen, how are they going to control it ...
 ?" She does not believe he will come out of prison alive. She
 wants to explain personally to the judge. She is sure that if she
 can make the judge understand, the judge would not sentence her
 son to prison for 25 years to life.

 But because Duane -- by all accounts a nonviolent, even passive
 young man --has just been convicted of his "third strike," and
 because Tulare County prosecutors have been insisting on imposing
 the "three strikes" penalty, the judge may have little choice.

 The "head sickness" is not just Mrs. Silva's diagnosis. In the
 more measured and less compelling words of a psychological
 evaluation performed a year and a half ago, Duane Silva's test
 results on a Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale showed "a Full
 Scale IQ of 71, placing present intellectual functioning within
 the low borderline range." The report seconded an earlier
 diagnosis of "Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar; with an Axis II
 diagnosis of Mild Mental Retardation (IQ 70)." Among the
 recommendations of the Central Valley Regional Center were that
 Silva "may benefit from placement in a residential facility
 geared to the needs of persons with mental disorders, and which
 can provide him with the supervision he requires, and to assure
 that he complies with his psychiatric treatment regimen."

 Duane Silva's criminal "career," all of it nonviolent, betrays
 the same random senselessness as other inexplicable incidents in
 his life. The 23-year-old acquired his first two "strikes" for
 arson when he was 20. He was convicted of those charges on the
 same day, as the result of a plea bargain.  One conviction was
 for two trash-can fires in the town of Strathmore. According to
 the police report, Silva acknowledged setting the fires,
 explaining that "he was working for Tulare County Sheriff's
 Office as a patrolman, to walk the streets of Strathmore and burn
 down all the dope dealer's [sic] businesses.  [He] stated he was
 in charge of Strathmore, Lindsay, Woodlake, and Woodville."


 Silva's second "strike" was for two small fires in trucks parked
 in Porterville. The more serious of the fires involved damage "to
 the area of the dash by the glove box." Silva awakened the owner
 of the truck by "banging on the door and ringing the doorbell" to
 alert him that the pickup was on fire.  The owner then put out
 the fire with a garden hose. Silva subsequently told fire
 investigators that "he was working undercover for the Strathmore
 Fire Department" and spotted four young men setting the fires. He
 added that the four men "tried to sell him gum that they took
 from one of the vehicles but he refused."

 After the arson arrests, Silva was declared incompetent to stand
 trial and was committed for a year to Atascadero State Hospital.
 Three months after his release from Atascadero, he was let out of
 jail as part of a plea bargain in which he pled guilty to two
 arson charges.

 Tulare County Deputy Public Defender Hugo Loza recalls the
 circumstances of that plea bargain. As the young man's attorney,
 he worked with the judge and the county director of mental health
 to get the troubled Silva some help. "We were intent," said Loza,
 "to let him out of custody and have him continue with his
 involvement with mental health. So he pled guilty basically
 because it was going to be credit for time served, and the only
 real condition was that he follow up with mental health and take
 the medicaiton that was prescribed."

 "Who knew," Loza added, "what the ramifications were going to be
 in the future, that this was going to be one of the stepping
 stones for a life sentence?" It was the "three strikes"
 legislation passed 2 1/2 years later that was responsible for the
 unexpected use of Loza's carefully crafted plea bargain designed
 to get Silva appropriate care.

 Silva had one subsequent conviction, in 1993, for arson in a
 trash bin in a sanitation yard. He was released with time served
 and three years' probation after 240 days in jail.

 Silva's third "strike" is a burglary at a 17-year-old friend's
 family home in Strathmore, a home where Silva had visited
 frequently in the past. The burglary occurred less than a week
 after the "three strikes" law went into effect, while Juan Macias
 and his family were in Las Vegas. When the Macias family came
 home from their weekend outing, they noticed the house had been
 burglarized. Missing were a VCR, about $25 in old coins and
 several pieces of jewelry that the family estimated were worth
 $1600.

 Silva informed his longtime friend Juan Macias that he knew where
 a VCR like the missing one was located. After scouting out the
 location of the VCR with Macias, Duane Silva called 911 to summon
 deputies to his friend's house to inform them that the missing
 VCR had been spotted. The man in whose house the VCR was later
 found said he had bought it for $40 from Silva, and Silva
 acknowledged as much to the investigating sheriff's deputy,
 stating that he himself had bought the VCR in Porterville and
 then sold it because he knew it was stolen. Silva also told the
 deputy that he had sold the missing jewelry for $10 and had spent
 the missing quarters playing pool and buying soda and candy.
 Under further questioning he admitted the burglary, saying he had
 entered the residence to take a video game.

 Silva told still another version of the story to an interviewer
 from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. In an interview
 at the sheriff's Bob Wiley Detention Facility outside Visalia, he
 denied selling the VCR and said he didn't think he had ever said
 that. "I didn't do nothing," he said. Silva claimed that the
 deputy who took the initial report "kept trying to tell me I did
 it and to say it, so I just gave up and let him write his own
 report." He said the officer "seemed to want me to say it."

 "I have a TV and a VCR," he tells the interviewer. "Why do I need
 another one?" Perhaps for the money he could get from selling
 them, he was told. He replied that he gets his disability money
 from his mom and "I don't spend much -- just soda and some
 munchies."

 The inability to tell when Duane Silva was fantasizing was among
 the childhood signs of the mental problems that have haunted the
 young man's entire life. "At home he would start inventing
 things. That's how he started," said Baudelia Silva, who, as a
 single mother of three, struggled to deal with her youngest
 child's aberrations. She recalls a day when she got home from
 work to find her house surrounded by police. Duane, who was about
 7 or 8 years old at the time, had called the police and told them
 he had been kidnapped.

 But the boy's problems were evident long before that. Mrs. Silva
 was told by a doctor once that Duane must have been hit when he
 was very young and that his brain was damaged, although she
 remembers no such accident. A psychological evaluation of the
 young man notes that "he reportedly did not sit until age 12
 months, and did not walk until 3 years of age. Speech was evident
 at 2 years of age."

 The problems with the boy accumulated as he grew older. Somehere
 between the ages of 5 and 7 he began running away from the house
 -- literally running --with no idea where he was going, sometimes
 even in winter weather. Typically, he would be found hungry in a
 park a few days later.

 Also from a very young age he would destroy everything around the
 house, from toys to expensive televisions. He would either take
 them apart or cut them with scissors. Says his mother, "I've
 never said this is a toy that's been Duane's since he was small
 because everything he destroys. He still does that."

 When Duane first got to school, officials noticed something
 wrong. They told his mother that they "didn't know what the
 problem was, but he wasn't a normal child." He was put in special
 education classes, which he seemed to enjoy. His mother says "he
 likes to draw and study and read a lot, but he can't learn."

 The boy took to calling the police "when he's not right." Mrs.
 Silva said he would "tell different stories each time, and the
 police would never know what's true."

 She described the raging moods to which her son was given. "When
 he doesn't have the problems with his head, he's very calm and he
 has no problems with anyone and he's very quiet. But he gets
 mentally out of control from one moment to the other, and he just
 leaves and goes into the street and starts doing things."

 Strathmore High School student coordinator Jerry Hinkle remembers
 trying to help the young man a number of times. He recalls a
 succession of incidents --bomb scares, an occasion when Silva
 thought he was a police undercover agent assisting a co-agent who
 ran a taco stand, other times when he wrote off-the-wall notes
 and acted out various TV fantasies. He said that Silva was "a
 pretty nice kid" when rational, "but you could always see it
 coming on when he was out of control."

 Duane Silva was asked in the jail interview what he feels at
 times like that.  With an impassive face, a monotone voice and as
 few words as he can use to answer questions, he ascribes those
 episodes to "my nervous system." He says it's something that
 comes over him "when it's hot." He describes his behavior at such
 times as "like a blackout."

 "I realize afterwards I did something wrong," he said. "At the
 time I just do it."

 Mrs. Silva is proud of her independence. While raising Duane and
 his two older sisters, she says, she has worked hard in the
 fields and in an olive plant until it closed two years ago. She
 never took welfare or asked for it. But she did need some help
 with her son. She took him to institutions. "I took him from one
 place to another," she said, speaking partly in English and
 partly through an interpreter. "And they would always shuffle me
 around, telling me, `Oh, no, you don't belong here, you belong in
 this other place,' and on it went."

 At least, when he was young, the police understood the problems,
 Mrs. Silva said, "but when he grew up and got 18 years, the
 police start to punish him and bring him to jails, but it is a
 big problem because it's a head sickness. And now he got two
 problems."

 She described how she sent letters to judges pleading for help
 with her son so he wouldn't end up in jail, "and no one helped
 me." She said she would go to a clinic and ask for help when
 Duane got out of control, "and the lady at the clinic tells me,
 `Well, we're taking care of him by order of the judge, so go talk
 to the judge. And I went to talk to the judge, and the judge
 says, `Take him to the clinic.' One sends me one way and the
 other sends me back, and my problem runs out into the street. And
 the next day the police take Duane. It's not right."

 Now, she says, "when he's in trouble, they put him in jail. He's
 sick, and he gets worse and worse and worse. It's hard for a
 person like that. No one understands me."

 Her fears are far greater for her son if he is sent to state
 prison. In a typical year, she says, he has "two or three
 problems." She adds, "In prison, what will happen, how are they
 going to control it with a bunch of other inmates that are really
 criminals? So when he starts yelling and getting disorderly, they
 will kill him." The translator adds, "She doesn't believe that he
 will come out of a prison alive because he needs medical
 attention." The mother's fear is echoed by the only other person
 who knows Silva well, on a day-to-day basis. Dan Hogan is a
 retired special education teacher at Strathmore High School.
 Silva was in his classes for four years, and Hogan often tried to
 help the young man and his mother on his own time. In a telephone
 interview, he reacted with horror to the idea that Silva might be
 sent to state prison at all, let alone for a minimum sentence of
 25 years.  "They would chew him up," he says, and goes on to
 explain.

 He described a polite, gentle and calm young man who "really
 wanted to please everyone, and he ended up by pleasing no one.
 All he's ever wanted to do was get along with people, to love and
 be loved." But, continued Hogan, in his anxiety to please, he
 destroyed the very things he was yearning for.

 For years, Hogan said, the kids in school made fun of Duane --
 "he was easy pickins." Mrs. Silva says it started even before he
 got to Hogan's classes.  "They called him dummy, crazy, and hit,
 a bunch of kicks and everything." It was very hard on Silva,
 Hogan adds. He recalls incidents in high school when other kids
 would "go to his home when his mother was not at home, make Duane
 let them in and then eat all the food in the kitchen and play his
 video games.  They used him to do these things that kids do. They
 take advantage of other kids, especially if they see that they're
 easy." They'd also "go out of their way to push him, thinking
 that was funny, but Duane would never retaliate. He didn't know
 how to retaliate to violence." Hogan speculates that perhaps the
 arson fires were the only way Silva could express his frustration
 at the abuse he suffered.

 Now, says Hogan, he can imagine the fate that awaits Silva. "In
 state prison," he says, "he would probably be dead in a year,
 because this is a nonviolent, unaggressive, very open-to-everyone
 person. So they would destroy him shortly -- very, very soon."

 Silva himself recognizes the danger he faces in prison, but he is
 typically laconic as he explains it. He was asked about his
 fears, and he answered only:  "gang-related stuff." Indeed, in
 the rigid Hispanic gang structure in California prisons, the
 young man has good reason for his fears.

 Another special ed teacher at Strathmore High has particularly
 strong feelings about criminals, and with very good reason. "The
 person who viciously raped me should be in prison for life," said
 Mary Jo Lichty, but "I think that Duane is hopefully corrigible.
 His problems are mental. I don't think he's in the same category
 as people who commit violent crimes."

 The "three strikes" law, however, does put Silva in the same
 category, and it appears to give the judge no options in
 sentencing him. Both the judge and the prosecutor have rejected
 previous attempts to remove this case from the scope of the
 "three strikes" law and to challenge the law on constitutional
 grounds.  One of the rejected constitutional challenges, said
 Silva's energetic public defender, Michael Sheltzer, was a
 "separation of powers" argument based on the fact that, under the
 law, judges do not have the discretion to dismiss "three strikes"
 cases in the interests of justice unless district attorneys ask
 them, thus giving essentially judicial powers to prosecutors.

 Constitutional challenges aside, without this new legislation,
 said one veteran defense attorney, "no judge would send Silva to
 prison. This guy would get probation, no doubt about it."

 Just about everyone who knows Silva, including his mother, thinks
 he needs some kind of institutional care, but not a prison. Mrs.
 Silva, who for years has lived with the strain of dealing with
 her unpredictable son, wants to continue to help him but
 recognizes that she is unable to do so while he is on the
 streets. She said she would like to volunteer in any mental
 institution in which her son is placed.

 Dan Hogan shares Mrs. Silva's hopes. "He just needs to be put
 somewhere where he would get gentle care ... where he can be
 looked after, and certainly not in a state prison," said Hogan.
 "He's just a docile young man. He would step out of his way to
 avoid an ant. That type, you know. Something is wrong. Somebody
 didn't do their work. Or it's the system. ... With all due
 respect to the law, this should not be."

 The troubled young man summed up his own views on the
 "three-strikes" law: "It doesn't seem right."


                  =================================



 CLARENCE MALBROUGH
 Charge: Petty theft with a prior conviction of theft
 Value of stolen goods: $80.67 (batteries)

 When Clarence Malbrough walked out of the Payless store in El
 Cerrito on March 9 with 13 packages of double-A batteries stuffed
 into his shirt, he was quickly apprehended by a security guard.
 Police subsequently cited and released him with a court date. The
 batteries were worth $80.67, and Malbrough freely admitted the
 crime. It was the last of a number of petty thefts that had kept
 him behind bars for much of his 48 years.

 "How did you get yourself into this mess?" he was asked.

 "Well, I'm a drug addict," he replied simply. "A drug addict for
 30 years." In the weeks before his final arrest, he'd been picked
 up for walking out of stores with Tylenol in one instance,
 cologne in another. Ironically, his last theft, the batteries,
 came as Malbrough was making a determined effort to "get back a
 life" by getting rid of "this monkey on my back" -- heroin.  "He
 had paid a lot to society," said one of his three adult
 daughters, "and he was finally getting it together. ... He was on
 the right track."

 For similar petty thefts in the past, Clarence Malbrough had
 generally received jail sentences of about 30 days. This time,
 the mild-mannered, balding grandfather of nine, who had been
 considered harmless enough to be cited and released, was hauled
 back to jail when the Contra Costa district attorney's office
 realized he was subject to a law that had gone into effect just
 two days before the theft, a law that could keep him in prison
 for decades. If convicted and sentenced as a "third striker," the
 48-year-old Malbrough may be in his 70s before he gets to go to
 the park again with his daughters and grandchildren.

 Clarence Malbrough is a family man against all odds. From his
 earliest years to his final days of freedom -- through addiction
 and crime and incarceration --he has maintained strong family
 ties. He was married to the same woman, also an addict, for 27
 years, and in recent years has had a stable home life with a
 woman friend and her children. He has worked to re-establish
 family ties with his three daughters -- a hospital receptionist,
 a security guard and a homemaker -- and his grandchildren, who
 range in age from 6 months to 15 years.

 He is also a deeply religious, Bible-quoting man; a gifted singer
 who once made a gospel tape at San Quentin prison; and an
 intelligent man who has read widely despite his prematurely
 terminated high school education.

 Malbrough's father did not live with the family and, says
 Clarence's sister, Vivian, "was never any help to us" during
 their childhood years. But Clarence Malbrough was very close to
 his mother, Cleophus, a college-educated, disabled teacher who
 raised him and his brother and sister to be Christians and
 law-abiding citizens. They were a happy, close-knit family, and
 his mother had firm standards. The kids always attended church
 and school activities -- young Clarence was a school crossing
 guard and won trophies for talent contests --and they were not
 allowed to play with kids whose families weren't known to their
 mother.

 Malbrough's childhood dreams were the American dream: "Like all
 kids, I wanted to be somebody -- a doctor, a lawyer, a fireman,
 policeman. ... We all had those dreams of wanting to be
 successful. A singer. I wanted to be an entertainer. I wanted to
 do a lot of things." At one point, a teacher even considered
 taking the talented youngster to Europe to sing.

 But those early dreams dissipated soon after his family moved
 from the supposedly rough but intimate neighborhood of North
 Richmond to the more upscale but anonymous atmosphere of South
 Richmond. In North Richmond, his life had revolved around Shields
 Park and the legendary Charlie Reid, "a man I idolized." Reid ran
 the park and taught sports to young Clarence and so many others
 -- football, baseball, track, nighttime basketball, running,
 boxing. The park, in fact, is now called Shields-Reid Park. "That
 whole city of North Richmond was raised by that man," he says.

 It was "a neighborhood where mostly everybody knew everybody,"
 and he never got into trouble there.

 But when the family moved to South Richmond, "the better part of
 town," when he was 15, Clarence fell in with a more rootless
 crowd. He can't explain how, but in a little time, "I just went
 astray and never got back on track. Maybe it was the wildness in
 me, maybe it was my destiny to do that."

 Whatever the reason, he began drinking and taking drugs with his
 new friends and was first sent to juvenile hall for taking a deck
 of cards and a knife from someone in a park. He was with a
 friend, and he was drunk. He also raided the lockers at a local
 bocce ball court.

 His first periods of imprisonment were in California Youth
 Authority institutions, which were "little kiddie places" back
 then. In time, he was back on the streets, with friends who were
 on heroin. He tried it when he was 19 or 20 -- "it was a real
 curiosity thing" -- and he was soon committing a range of
 property crimes to finance his habit. His first big crime was
 forgery of an unemployment check, which got him a civil
 commitment in a California prison supposedly geared to
 rehabilitation. That did nothing to slake his addiction, and
 dirty drug tests and other violations soon had him returning to
 prison regularly.

 In his mid 20s, Malbrough recalls, "I was mostly a follower," and
 one of the people he followed was an older friend who was a
 robber. "I had never been into that type of lifestyle," he says,
 but "it was fascinating to me back then --quick money, fast
 money." He followed that man into a motel robbery that got him a
 five year-to-life sentence in San Quentin, of which he served 2
 1/2 years. He was a model prisoner -- singing and taking classes
 in broadcasting, speed reading, landscaping and college academic
 subjects -- and the warden and others "went to bat for me."

 When he got to prison, he says, "I was still a child. ... I
 walked inside and it was a whole different world. Everyplace you
 went there was guns, and when you eat there's guns, when you
 sleep there's guns over you, watching you.  There's people dying
 all around you. It was hell. Violence was rampant. It's totally
 different from being on the street -- it's a jungle, and only the
 strong survived. There was the prey and the predator. If you was
 not strong enough or knew someone who could give you the ropes on
 how to conduct yourself and how to grow into manhood, you didn't
 live. You died. I've seen a lot of my friends die. People there
 were so into killing each other."

 It was a deeply unsettling experience for a man of whom his
 youngest daughter says: "My father has never committed a violent
 act in his life." Or, in the words of Malbrough's sister Vivian,
 "I have never known my brother to harm anybody or try to hurt
 anyone. But I just felt he's always harmed himself." When he got
 out of prison, Malbrough held a variety of jobs, including
 several as a nurse's aide, and for a while he moderated his
 heroin use, using off and on. But he was a different person.

 Prison, he said, "clammed me up. I wasn't able to function on the
 street when I got out. You don't know how to relate to people
 anymore."

 This decades-long drug addict grows intense and eloquent as he
 expands on the ravages of prison and drugs. When you get out of
 prison, he says, "you want to do right, and then you meet
 resistance, and you're not that strong of a person anyway. You
 have frailties, you're insecure -- that's the reason you're in
 jail in the first place. ... They didn't provide anything for you
 to better the condition while you was in there. You was taught by
 the people of your peers who are in the same condition, and
 you're put back in the same environment when you get out."

 Heroin use, he continues, "is another crutch, another escape. You
 go into a shell when things don't want to go your way. You try to
 hide from the reality of your situation. ... It's frightful, and
 you fear that, and you fear jail, you fear what can happen to
 you. So the only peace that you find if you're into drugs would
 be that solitude or that escapism that you find from the peace
 that you get from your drugs -- for me, anyway."

 Out of prison and back on drugs in 1980, Malbrough asked a friend
 of a friend for some money. Some time later, when the man, who
 lived in the same building, asked for the money back. Malbrough
 didn't have it. The man called the cops.  Malbrough says that the
 DA convinced the victim he was scared, which elevated the crime
 to a strongarm robbery. He also says that he was let into the
 man's apartment and didn't break in, as he was accused of doing.
 But in either case, he took a deal for three years of prison time
 and was sent back to state prison. It was his second "strike."

 No one claimed to have been injured in either of Malbrough's
 "strikes." Back in prison, Malbrough again sang in a gospel
 group. He also worked in a variety of positions, from nursing
 assistance to construction and cooking.  A few years later,
 Malbrough was back in prison for a daytime residential burglary.
 He recalls that the judge didn't see him as a career criminal but
 rather as a "typical drug addict" engaging in property crimes.
 The judge, he says, wanted to send him to a drug program, but
 that option was not available because of his record, so he
 sentenced him to just two years because of the mitigating
 circumstances.

 As Malbrough and his wife went back and forth to prison because
 of the various crimes they committed to pay for their serious
 heroin habits -- and subsequent parole violations for dirty drug
 tests -- their three daughters were raised together by a
 "beautiful, Christian" foster family with whom they placed them.
 Malbrough emphasizes that the children were never taken from them
 by authorities and that they were raised by a good family with
 good values. When he and his wife were out of prison, the
 children would often come stay with them -- "the door was always
 open for us ... we were never shut out."

 Often, over the years, Malbrough tried to kick his heroin habit
 by going into programs. But, said his sister, most of the them
 were short detox programs and couldn't help him. And, adds a
 friend, the longer-term programs he explored, which might have
 done him some good, all had long waiting lists and didn't accept
 MediCal.

 Nor could he get a steady job. Many times, he said, he put in
 applications for positions for which he was well qualified but
 was not accepted because of his felony record. When he did once
 get a good job with an oil company, his parole officer showed up
 to verify that he was working; then, he said, with his felony
 record thus exposed, he was fired. After a while, he gave up on
 finding employment.

 Malbrough's life changed dramatically in 1989, after eight months
 in county jail for some petty thefts. He left his wife and fell
 in love with a woman who became an important, positive influence
 on him. His new woman friend, Saundra Dickens, was a straight,
 working woman who didn't know at first that he was using heroin.
 When she found out, she gave him an ultimatum. For the first time
 in his life, Malbrough gave up heroin cold-turkey, without having
 to go to jail or prison. Dickens stayed with him through the
 sickness of withdrawal and showed him he could do it by himself
 with good, loving care and food.

 Malbrough, who had spent most of his years "caught up in that
 street life," as Dickens put it, settled easily with her into a
 stable routine -- perhaps the first he had known since childhood.
 There were always lots of children and grandchildren around the
 house, and her children enjoyed the company of the man they
 called Dad. Malbrough and Dickens spent their evenings at home,
 playing Scrabble, canasta and backgammon and listening to music.
 They'd also have long discussions of current affairs.

 Through the more than four years they lived together, Dickens put
 her foot down whenever he slipped back to drugs, and as a result
 his drugless periods stretched longer and longer. At one point,
 he was drug-free for 16 months before backsliding. He spent much
 of 1992 and all of 1993 going through a variety of detox programs
 and looking for an opportunity to get into a methadone
 maintenance program. To get into one of the detox programs he
 even advanced $240 of his meager disability funds.

 The process would have been easier, said Dickens, if they could
 have afforded to live in a better neighborhood, where drugs were
 less readily available. "He truly wanted to quit," she said, but
 Malbrough still had a psychological dependency; whenever anything
 went wrong with his life -- like when they lost their home
 because of financial difficulties -- he'd return to the crutch of
 heroin.

 Shortly before his final arrest, once again on heroin and facing
 a string of petty theft charges, Malbrough realized he had
 reached the end of the line with his self-destructive way of
 life. Dickens, he says, "wanted her old guy back --not this new
 guy on drugs, whom I don't like myself." They had separated, with
 the understanding that they would get together again if he got
 straightened out and found a new place for them to live.

 Malbrough was determined to "get back a life. ... I cried, and I
 prayed, and I got on this program." The program was a methadone
 treatment program run by Berkeley Addiction Treatment Services.
 It was not easy to get accepted; the program had a long waiting
 list. Every day, Malbrough went to the agency to see if his name
 had popped up. It took several months to get into the program. He
 entered the BATS 21-day detox program in February and began the
 maintenance program March 1.

 After he entered the BATS methadone program but before he began
 the regimen of individual counseling and group therapy sessions,
 Malbrough committed his last petty theft -- stealing the
 batteries from Payless. He wanted some money for cigarettes. He
 was, he says now, still "in the frame of mind of a heroin
 addict."

 Walter Byrd, executive director of BATS, says he recognized in
 Malbrough someone ready to change his ways. Malbrough, he said,
 was "tired of the same old grind," and he was persistent in
 seeking a slot in his program. But it does not surprise Byrd that
 Malbrough committed another petty theft after entering the
 program. It takes more than sobriety to change the behavior of a
 hardcore heroin user like Malbrough, he said, and "you can't do
 it alone -- you need help."

 "You don't know how to do things the way other people do," he
 said. The BATS program is designed to teach job, coping and
 social skills, and that process "certainly takes more than a few
 days." The treatment is "about learning to make good choices for
 yourself," Byrd said, and until then, recovering addicts will
 often revert to "whatever they learned to do to survive on the
 streets."

 Malbrough did not attempt to run or hide from his last crime.
 "From the very first," he says, "I always said that I did the
 crime -- there's no doubt about this. I cooperated in every way.
 It was a petty theft."

 Malbrough is familiar enough with the customary penalties for
 petty theft. In the weeks following his Payless theft, judges in
 Alameda County sentenced him for nearly identical offenses. He
 was given a three-day sentence for the cologne theft and 30 days
 for the Tylenol theft -- with a few more weeks of time dropped so
 he could continue in his methadone and counseling program.  But
 before Malbrough was released from those sentences, an arrest
 warrant was issued by neighboring Contra Costa County for the
 batteries theft for which had previously been cited and released.
 Although the charge was nearly identical to the one for which he
 was doing 30 days, this time the sentence could be 25 years or
 more. He was brought to Contra Costa's West County Detention
 Facility, one of the first Californians to face the
 "three-strikes" charge.

 Subsequently, Malbrough was offered a deal by the Contra Costa
 prosecutors --six years for the petty theft, by "striking" a
 prior -- but he rejected it. "I don't want six years for picking
 up some batteries -- that usually carries 30 days. It's not fair.
 They're not giving me that much time for petty theft. The only
 reason they'd give you that much time is because they're using
 your past record, and your past record shouldn't be held against
 you, because you already paid for that."

 Malbrough feels that the law shouldn't apply retroactively, with
 harsh new penalties set on the basis of crimes committed years
 before the "three strikes" law went into effect. "If they're
 gonna give people three strikes," he said, "they should start at
 one. Start it at the beginning, because [otherwise] everybody's
 already struck out -- the people that it's gonna hurt. ... It's
 not getting at the people they want to get to.

 Facing this newly legislated penalty is "a scary situation," he
 says, "it's hell. All your life goes before your eyes. And you
 see all your mistakes and wish that you could right them. You
 wish you could tell those people, `Hey, I'm not like that no
 more. Can't you see how much I've changed over the years. ... If
 you look at a person's record and see that he's making a good
 attempt and effort to right wrongs and to stop the things he was
 doing ... and is not a threat to society, then that person should
 be given another chance."

 Malbrough has found a kind of happiness despite the uncertainty
 of his present circumstances. Looking back, he says, "I think I
 was in a bubble and I couldn't find my way out of it. I just went
 round and round and round and round and round, and I finally
 found a way to get out of that bubble, and that's through my lord
 Jesus Christ. Now I'm happy."

 Clarence Malbrough still has dreams of what he would do if given
 another chance. He'd like to resume the drug program that was
 terminated by his incarceration. He'd like to continue his daily
 visits with his daughters and grandchildren. "We'd been doing a
 lot of catching up," said one daughter. And the children, who
 delighted in the wrestling, the park and zoo visits and the
 picnics with their recently returned grandfather, were devastated
 when he was unable to keep his promise to take them all to Marine
 World Africa USA.  But before he gets to try his wings again,
 Malbrough must pay for his last crime, and how much he ought to
 pay is an issue that troubles all involved. He says, as his
 sister put it, that "he is willing to pay for his crime -- but
 not give up his life for a petty theft."

 Understandably, the Payless manager from whose store Malbrough
 stole the 13 packages of batteries does not see the crime as a
 simple petty theft. His store loses $1000 a day in disappearing
 inventory -- mostly through shoplifting --and he finds it
 "extremely difficult to be sympathetic." Crimes like Malbrough's
 put his own job in jeopardy.

 But the manager, John Scalet, agonizes over what is the
 appropriate sentence for such a crime. He thinks the amount of
 the theft and the previous criminal history must be taken into
 account. "Every case is different," he says, "but if it's
 repeated -- if he's habitually a criminal -- then that's where
 `three strikes' has to come into play."

 However, he says, you also have to ask, "Is he gonna get better
 in jail or out of jail. Someone has to answer that question. I
 don't know. ... Fortunately I'm not in the situation where I have
 to make those decisions." In any case, he says, "it's hard for me
 to justify 25 years. ... Is 25 years too long? Probably. Could
 the person have been taught the same lesson in five?  Probably."


                  =================================



 MICHAEL GARCIA
 Charge: Petty theft with a prior conviction of theft
 Value of stolen goods: $5.62 (one package of meat)

 "I think the law is a good idea," stated Michael Garcia. "I mean,
 if I was to get busted for another serious crime, I'd think I'd
 have it coming."

 Michael Garcia is a soft-spoken, 35-year-old Mexican American who
 was the picture of self-deprecation throughout his interview in
 the Los Angeles County Jail. He often had trouble making eye
 contact and freely expressed his shame for his actions. He still
 seemed in disbelief that he is facing a life sentence for
 stealing a package of meat.

 "I don't think I should get away with it," Garcia said. "I mean,
 I'll go back to prison if they think I should, but I just think
 that life is a bit too much, you know."

 Michael Garcia obviously struggles when discussing his crime and
 his inability to get control of his heroin addiction. "I just
 wanted to be a hard-working dude like my father, but for some
 reason I was never able to do that."

 On March 12, 1994, five days after the "three strikes"
 legislation was signed into law, Michael Garcia, his stepmother,
 Mary, and his mentally retarded brother, Porfirio, had run out of
 money.

 Mary had been erroneously overpaid by Social Security for several
 months. When the error was noticed, her subsequent payments were
 cut off until the account was reconciled. Meanwhile, Michael
 Garcia, who did temporary work fixing trucks for J & G Produce in
 Pomona, hadn't had any work in several months.

 Garcia walked into the Stater Brothers' Market on South Garey
 Street, in Pomona, three blocks from his home. It was the store
 in which he and his stepmother bought all of their groceries. But
 on March 12, he didn't have enough to buy the family's evening
 meal.

 Michael's stepmother, Mary Garcia, was interviewed by phone while
 she was preparing beans for her and Porfirio's evening meal. She
 talked simply about Michael's motivation. "We didn't have
 anything to eat," she says. "My check was gone, and J & G hadn't
 had work for Michael in a while, so he had no income coming in.
 He never told me he was going to do that [steal the meat], or I
 would have told him `no way.' I guess he just couldn't see us
 eating leftover beans again."

 The store's security guard noticed Garcia shoving one package of
 chuck steak down his pants. The package had three steaks in it.
 "One for my mother, one for my brother, and one for me," notes
 Garcia. He was easily apprehended and immediately confessed.
 According to the Pomona Police Department's report, Garcia told
 an officer, "Yes, I know, I came in here to steal." Garcia
 remembers that after the arresting officers were able to bring up
 his prior record on their computer, they joked and wagered with
 one another as to whether or not he would be a "three strikes"
 candidate.

 Michael Garcia talks about his background with great difficulty.
 It is not easy to get details from him, and he protects his loved
 ones zealously.

 His parents, Edward Garcia and Margaret Alvarado, separated when
 Michael was 2.  After the separation, Margaret didn't see Michael
 or his older siblings, Edward and Judy, until they had grown to
 adulthood. Michael was raised in the belief that his aunt,
 Virginia Redollar, was his mother. He found out that this was not
 the case when he turned 15. Shortly afterward, Michael relates,
 he "began hanging out with the wrong crowd in the barrio" and was
 arrested for the first time.

 When Garcia is asked why his mother left and did not seek out her
 children for so many years, he responds that he "has no idea." He
 hints cryptically at problems with his father but is clearly
 unwilling to get into this aspect of his life.

 It took a call to Garcia's mother, Margaret Alvarado, to learn
 the story of his upbringing. "I never kept in contact with my
 children because my ex-husband was a rough character. I was
 threatened, and believe you me in those days he meant it. Michael
 knows, but he keeps a lot of things inside. He doesn't want to
 say anything against his dad, especially since he's dead."
 Margaret recalls "beating after beating" inflicted upon her by a
 husband inebriated on alcohol and pills, and a system that failed
 to protect her and her children. Prior to the breakup of her
 marriage, she had Edward Garcia arrested several times, once for
 breaking her nose. One of the Pomona police investigators warned
 her that she should "get out of there or she was gonna get
 killed."

 After that arrest, Edward warned her that she had "better not go
 to sleep." Margaret wept openly when she described the last day
 that she saw her 5-year-old son, Edward Jr., her 4-year-old
 daughter, Judy, and her 2-year-old son, Michael. "Neither
 Michael's father or I slept for two days, him because of the
 drugs, and me because I was afraid to go to sleep. He came in
 very drunk and high, and grabbed a hatchet and was threatening to
 kill me. He had a glazed look in his eye, and I believed he meant
 it. He was drunk enough where I convinced him that I had to go to
 the bathroom, and he let me. I don't know how I was able to
 squeeze through the tiny bathroom window, but I did it and got
 away. That was the last day I saw any of my kids until they were
 adults." Margaret said that Edward had threatened to kill her if
 she tried to take the kids away from him. Based on her previous
 experiences with Edward and her disappointment in the system's
 ability to protect her, she believed him.  "Michael grew up
 ignored or abused by his father," Margaret stated. "He didn't
 understand why the person he thought was his mother [really his
 aunt] cared so much more for the other kids in the family. What
 he didn't know was that those kids were his cousins, not his
 brothers and sister, and were her real children.  Michael didn't
 have a lot of love from either his mother or his father."

 Michael Garcia's first arrest occurred when he was 16 years old,
 not long after he found out about his mother. On July 6, 1975,
 Garcia relates, he was standing in front of his house in his
 "barrio" in Pomona, when a car driven by several Latino youth
 sped by spewing gunfire at a neighbor girl. The girl was killed,
 and Pomona police arrived on the scene and questioned Garcia and
 other neighborhood residents about witnessing the murder.

 Several drunk neighborhood youths subsequently drove by and saw
 the commotion near Garcia's house. They asked him what was going
 on, and he told them. "Can you drive?" the older youths asked.
 "Sure I can drive," Michael responded, trying to act brave. "Get
 in," they replied.

 Garcia admits that he knew that "things were going to turn out
 bad" after he got into the car. He hoped that either they would
 be unable to find those responsible for the shooting or they
 would just scare them. The three 17- and 18-year-olds in the back
 seat were all drunk, and all had guns. In the next neighborhood
 they spotted the youths they believed to be the culprits and
 fired, killing one of them. They were all subsequently
 apprehended. Although Michael did not shoot or even carry a gun,
 he pleaded guilty to murder, a crime for which he is legally
 culpable under California law. He spent three years in the
 California Youth Authority for this offense.

 Neither of the two adult offenses that are charged by the Los
 Angeles County district attorney's office as "strikes" against
 Garcia involved physical harm to a victim. In 1979, high on
 heroin, Garcia used an inoperable, unloaded gun to steal $20 from
 a truck driver in broad daylight in downtown Pomona. Garcia
 describes being "sick" -- a heroin addict's code word for
 "needing a fix." He pleaded guilty and spent two years in prison
 for that offense.

 In 1986, Garcia was again using heroin and again needed money for
 drugs. His girlfriend at the time was house-sitting for some
 neighbors. Garcia stole their VCR and was apprehended by police
 walking down the street carrying the VCR. He confessed and
 immediately led police to the home he had burglarized. Upon his
 release from jail approximately one year later, Garcia says, he
 met with his victim and apologized for the theft.

 After his last release from prison, Garcia tried to stay off of
 heroin and get a job. His father, Edward Garcia, had been
 diagnosed with colon cancer while Garcia was in prison, and the
 disease was at an advanced stage by the time Garcia was paroled.

 According to Mary Garcia, Michael stayed constantly at his
 father's side. His father was bedridden and wearing a colostomy
 bag. As it filled with feces and urine, Michael diligently
 emptied it and cleaned his father's stoma so that he did not
 become infected. Michael and Mary had the constant job of
 attending to Edward's every need in order to allow him to die at
 home and with dignity. Upon his father's death, Michael became
 severely depressed and resumed his use of heroin.

 Garcia repeatedly tested dirty while on parole prior to his
 arrest. He had asked his parole agent several times for a
 referral to a drug program, but he was informed that there were
 no placements available.

 According to Parole Agent Don Smith, "Michael is not a bad guy.
 He had some problems with dope use, but he's not dangerous."
 Smith indicated that he would have sent Garcia to a residential
 drug treatment program but every one had a long waiting list.
 Smith felt that the "three strikes" law should have been written
 for people who are dangerous. "Petty theft," he said, "shouldn't
 be 25 to life."


                  =================================



 RICKY DEAN SPAHN
 Charge: Residential burglary, three counts
 Value of stolen goods: $5151.96

 Sean and Kimberly Riley were visiting friends on Hawthorne Street
 in Eureka that afternoon. They were with their hosts in the back
 yard when a 9-year-old neighbor girl ran into the yard and told
 them she had seen a man go into the hosts' house and come back
 out the front door with a purse under his arm. The purse was
 Kimberly Riley's. The man ran into a nearby alley. The police
 were called and responded quickly.

 The first officer to arrive talked to 9-year-old Jessica and
 learned from her that the man she saw run out of the house with
 the purse stayed at a white house with red trim on Union Street,
 which intersected Hawthorne. She knew this because she had seen
 the man come and go from the house several times recently.  The
 sergeant on duty drove to that house on Union Street, talked to
 the owner and described the suspect. The homeowner quickly
 identified him as Ricky Spahn.  He said Spahn often came to the
 house to visit his daughter, Stacy, who was Spahn's younger
 brother's girlfriend.

 The officer cruised the neighborhood, and a couple of blocks
 away, at 2153 Pine Street, he observed Spahn helping another man
 repair an automobile. Spahn was detained without incident. The
 crime occurred at 12:45 p.m. Spahn was arrested 45 minutes later.
 The purse contained several credit cards, a wristwatch valued at
 $16.96, a brown leather wallet valued at $5, and $55 in cash.

 When blond-haired, blue-eyed, 30-year-old Ricky Spahn was booked
 into the Humboldt County jail at 6:30 p.m. on July 28, he had 49
 cents in his pocket.  Despite his past prison commitments, Spahn
 is not the stereotypical, hard-nosed ex-con. He is eager to
 please, eager to admit all of his wrongdoing and even eager to
 confess to crimes that the police did not know had occurred. In
 fact, one such unreported crime is count one of the "three
 strikes" prosecution he is currently facing.

 Shortly after his arrest, he was interrogated by a Eureka Police
 Department detective who says he has known Spahn since he was 7
 or 8 years old. Later in the day, Spahn and he drove around
 identifying other homes that he had burglarized. Spahn pointed
 out a total of 10 homes he said he had entered within the past
 few weeks. He told the detectives that he got about $50 from one
 house, less than $20 each from two others, but police later said
 that two rings valued at $5000 were also missing. Amazingly,
 Spahn reported that he took nothing from the other seven houses.

 Spahn is what police call a "green thumb burglar." He waits until
 he sees someone outside in the garden, watering the lawn or
 gardening, then dashes in and looks only for a purse or wallet,
 snatches it and runs quickly back out again. The detective's
 report states: "He would then take the purse of wallet and go to
 a nearby alley to take out the money. He would then throw the
 purse or wallet down and walk away. We asked him about the
 jewelry in some of these purses and he told us he never took any
 as he didn't know if any of it was real or not."

 Is this criminal for real?  Or is he the comic character that a
 local monthly newspaper described him as in the cover story of
 its October issue: "Local police enjoy a good laugh and Ricky
 Spahn has certainly provided one. He'll be remembered as the
 burglar who rummaged through a vehicle, found a Polaroid camera
 and took his own mug shot. Then he fled, leaving behind both
 camera, and incriminating photograph. ... He once tried to get a
 stolen television set home by wheeling it down the street in a
 shopping cart -- in broad daylight." Actually, Spahn says, it was
 a baby carriage, not a shopping cart.  The interviewer asked
 Spahn why he did this -- does he drink? "No, I don't," he replied
 forcefully. "Never touch the stuff." Then why keep pulling these
 burglaries? "I needed the money for supplies." Supplies? "Pot,"
 he says with a sheepish grin. "You know, marijuana." Why did you
 want to get the marijuana? he was asked. "Because it makes my
 headaches better. You know, my spells."

 Spahn's mother had a great deal to say about her son and his
 "spells." Ima Jean Spahn moved recently to Redding with Ricky's
 younger brother, Zach. She was still living in Eureka when Ricky
 was released from prison in November 1993, and he lived at home
 from then until his arrest in July 1994.  "Ricky is a good son,"
 his mother reports, "except for stealing things like he does. But
 when he was at home, he would give me $250 each month out of his
 disability for the rent, and he always bought his own food."
 Spahn's father and mother are separated.

 Spahn is one of eight children and the only one with a prolonged
 criminal history -- and that has not a little to do with a tragic
 accident in 1966, when Mrs. Spahn was driving outside Eureka on
 Highway 101. The five oldest children were with her in the car,
 and she was pregnant. She lost control of the car, which rolled
 over three times before coming to a stop. Miraculously, the only
 injury was to Ricky, who suffered a terrible blow to the left
 side of his forehead. "He had his first spell two weeks later,"
 Mrs. Spahn recalls, "and ever since then it has been nothing but
 pain and sorrow for that poor boy. Pain and sorrow and bad
 times."

 Ricky was 2 years old at the time. For the next six years he
 spent months at a time in Stanford University Hospital and the
 University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. He was
 suffering from seizures, sometimes up to 30 or 35 of them each
 day. He also developed meningitis. The doctors tried a myriad of
 medications in an attempt to control the constant seizures, but
 nothing seemed to work.

 "You know," Mrs. Spahn tells the interviewer, "it was like Ricky
 never really had a childhood. It was always in and out, down
 south and back home. He never got the kind of chance or schooling
 that other kids get. He was brave, though, and was a sweet child
 even with all those problems and those spells all the time."

 Finally, the doctors exhausted their pharmaceutical solutions to
 Spahn's seizures, and they decided to try a surgical procedure.
 It was a very chancy operation, and the results were not too
 predictable. But the doctors thought that if they went in and
 took out part of the frontal lobe of the brain, and part of the
 temporal lobe, it was their best hope for mitigating or
 eliminating the seizures. They were grievously wrong.

 "As I recall it, by the time the stitches came out and his hair
 grew back, you could tell it had done something to the boy," his
 mother remembers. "I mean, something besides making him a bit
 slow, which I suppose you might expect from that kind of an
 operation. After all, they take out that much of what there is,
 it has got to slow you down some."

 The worst of it, however, was not the physical effects
 themselves. The surgical exorcism was covered with a steel plate,
 but it still left a sizable, and very noticeable, dent in his
 forehead. And children can be terribly cruel and insensitive.

 "I can't remember how many times his teachers and I talked about
 what could be done," Mrs. Spahn recounts as she speaks of how the
 other grade schoolers would tease Ricky, both for the "hole in
 his head" and about how "slow" he was. "The best they could do
 was speak to the other children, but ... well, kids are kids, and
 they just kept making Ricky's life hell. The staff, I suppose
 they did the best they could. And within a year or so, I got to
 admit, he was hard to keep an eye on."

 Spahn's last year of formal schooling was in seventh grade. He
 says he reads at about the second-grade level. When asked why he
 quit, he shook his head and said, "They wasn't doing me no good.
 They wouldn't learn me anything, so I figured why should I bother
 to go." His mother did not protest the decision too vigorously.

 "I tell you, right back then I think they cut out the wrong part
 or something," she says with obvious feeling in her voice,
 "because really, as soon as he could get up and run around again
 you could tell he was a different little boy.  Within a year, by
 the time he was 9 or 10, he started getting into trouble.  First
 it was that he just wouldn't listen. Then he was so hyper, you
 know?  Never could sit still. Never could just sit down and be
 quiet."

 And it got to where he just wouldn't listen ... he wouldn't sass
 me, but he just did his thing."

 She also confirms that she didn't stop him when he first started
 smoking marijuana in the house. "He said that it made the pain
 from the spells better," she explained, "and at first it was just
 a couple a day by himself. But then other kids would come around
 and ask him for some, and being the kind of boy that he is, he
 would always share with them." She pauses for a few seconds.
 "Then he didn't have any money to get more for himself," she
 continues, "and that's when he started going into people's
 houses."

 Dr. Kurt Osborne is the neurosurgeon who, along with his partner,
 Dr. John Gambin, has been treating Spahn since the boy was 13, in
 1977. He explains the medical effect of what happened to Spahn.
 He says that the 8-year-old's surgery was an experimental
 procedure at the time, and that while there is not yet unity of
 opinion in the field as to the results of such an operation, the
 literature is clear that the chemical imbalances caused by the
 removal of the brain matter from those areas can in fact cause
 severe personality changes.

 "What happens after a seizure," he explains, "is that the brain
 goes into what is called a `post-dictal state,' where you're not
 quite sure what is going on.  You can understand, if the boy has
 30 or 35 of these sort of mini-mal seizures a day, he is never
 free of that state of mind."

 The literature, he said, reflects that after an operation such as
 Spahn's, patients develop personality patterns that are
 completely unknown to them prior to the operation. "Some people
 have developed hyper-religiosity," he explains, "while others
 have developed hyper-sexuality, and other hyper symptoms. For
 Spahn to have developed the hyperactivity his mother notes is
 entirely consistent with the pattern of personality change
 reported by the literature."

 The doctor reports that he and his partner saw early on that
 Spahn's ability to respond to his environment was so obviously
 impaired that he was in need of a caretaker environment. "He is
 one of those rare, unfortunate patients who will probably always
 have seizures," the doctor reports. "Even in the first few months
 of this year, when I was seeing him frequently and know he was
 taking his medications, he was still having seizures. We switched
 his medication two or three times to try and find something that
 would work," Dr. Osborne said sadly, "but when I last saw him
 several months ago he was still having five or six seizures every
 night."

 When the doctor learned that Spahn was probably headed back to
 prison, this time for 25-to-life, his response was one of
 disgust. "This guy doesn't belong in a prison," he declared. "You
 can lead him around by a ring in his nose he is so placid. I am
 not a neuropsychiatrist, but if I was, I'd commit him to a state
 hospital for the developmentally disabled."

 When informed that the chief prosecutor, District Attorney Worth
 Dikeman, had called Spahn a "poster boy" for "three strikes" --
 that is, just the kind of criminal the "three strikes" law was
 designed to put away -- the doctor retorted angrily, "The hell he
 is! If you want to call him a poster boy, he is more like a
 Ronald Reagan poster boy. He is exactly the kind of person who
 belongs in one of the scores of mental health facilities that
 Reagan dismembered when he was governor."

 Spahn's first two "strikes" were for crimes very similar to the
 ones for which he is now awaiting trial. When he was almost 21
 years old, he was convicted of two counts of residential
 burglary. He served two years in prison after spending a year in
 the county jail awaiting trial. He was paroled on June 23, 1987,
 and on Aug. 18, 1987, he was again arrested and charged with two
 counts of residential burglary. He returned to prison in October
 1987 and was paroled after spending six years behind bars.

 One of Spahn's victims, the woman whose home is represented by
 count two of his current, "third-strike" prosecution, has strong
 feelings about what should happen to him now.

 Nancy Morse is a single parent in her 40s. She lives with her two
 daughters, ages 6 and 7. Her eldest daughter lives away from home
 and attends college.  Morse takes legal courses at College of the
 Redwoods and hopes to become a legal assistant or paralegal so
 she can get off AFDC. "I really hate not being able to support
 myself and the kids," she says.

 The burglary had an unintended consequence for Morse's youngest.
 The 6-year-old's birthday was July 25, and Morse was carefully
 saving her food stamps so the youngster could have several of her
 friends over for the celebration. But on July 23 disaster struck
 -- disaster in the form of Ricky Spahn. Morse reported that at
 some point during the early afternoon, someone came in the rear
 door of her home and took her purse. About an hour after she
 noticed it missing, a neighbor called and reported he had found
 it in an alley near her house. It was returned to her, minus some
 makeup, $133 in food stamps and about $50 in cash.

 In describing the burglary at the Morse residence, Spahn said
 that he saw some people out front trying to jump-start a car, so
 he quickly snuck into the house through an open back door. He
 entered the back yard through an alley, and left unobserved the
 same way.

 When Morse learned from Detective Charles Swanson that Spahn was
 a "third-strike" candidate and would be going to prison for a
 long, long time for his crime, she immediately took issue with
 the possible sentence. "I just don't think the sentence is
 appropriate to the type of crimes he has committed," she declares
 with feeling. "I mean, according to what the officer said, none
 of them was violent. He just isn't a violent person." Her voice
 becomes more animated as she adds, "There are people who have
 raped that are walking around out there. Prison beds should be
 saved for them. We should save the jail time for those people,
 not people who don't hurt others." Morse also spoke to Spahn's
 lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Jim Steinberg, and learned of
 Spahn's physical condition and the seizures from which he suffers
 constantly. She was told that smoking marijuana makes Spahn "feel
 better" about the pain from his seizures. "My God," she said,
 "once you know his motive, the burglary doesn't even seem
 criminal. All kinds of people need marijuana for medical problems
 such as glaucoma and cancer, and if it helps them cope with their
 pain, they should be able to have it prescribed for them by a
 doctor."

 "I feel strongly about this," she says. "It is really an issue
 society needs to confront. And I can't help but think that given
 his medical problem, a sentence like closely supervised community
 service would be a more appropriate justice-system reaction
 anyway. Who's to say he can't make some kind of contribution,"
 she asks, "to pay society back for what he has done?" Morse's
 understanding that Spahn is not a violent person was confirmed by
 the detective who questioned him after his arrest, and who in
 fact has arrested Spahn on four or five previous occasions. At
 the preliminary hearing, Swanson testified that he got along well
 with Spahn. He said that Spahn had never resisted arrest or
 caused any problems of violence in his presence and was generally
 cooperative with him. The detective also testified that the type
 of burglaries Spahn committed would be less likely to involve
 confrontations with people in the house.

 Swanson was also asked about Spahn's cognitive ability, his
 ability to understand. "Well," replied the detective, "I think if
 things are spoken in simple sentences and questions and answers
 that he understands."

 The charges facing Ricky Spahn have been the source of some
 attention in the media along the North Coast, where interest in
 the Proposition 184 is running high. Both of Humboldt County's
 legislators are asking constituents to vote no on the "three
 strikes" initiative even though both of them voted in favor of
 the March 1994 "three strikes" law that is now on the books.

 State Senator Mike Thompson says that seeing the law in actual
 practice has convinced him its broad sweep is a mistake. "In some
 ways it doesn't go far enough. In other ways, it goes too far,"
 the senator told the North County Journal. "I want the people to
 vote against Prop. 184 so the Legislature can go back in January
 and make that third strike a hit that puts away the ones that
 should be put away, but doesn't waste money on petty thieves."
 Assemblyman Dan Hauser agrees.

 And the North County Journal opined in its cover story on Spahn,
 "Wardens may soon have to face the question: Where will we put
 the rapists and the murderers if all the beds hold burglars and
 thieves?"


                  =================================



 KENDALL COOKE
 Charge: Petty theft with a prior conviction of theft
 Value of stolen goods: $1.14 (one can of beer)

 Kendall Cooke laughs easily. He has an engaging, joking
 relationship with the sheriff's deputies at the San Diego County
 Jail, where he is currently incarcerated. He is similarly at ease
 with a stranger ushered in to interview him, and soon he is
 relating proudly that he was recently crowned chess champion of
 his jail unit.

 But a shadow passes over the face of the handsome, thoughtful
 31-year-old when he begins to discuss his old neighborhood and
 his relationship with his ex-wife. And his eyes shift sadly to
 the floor when he talks of the heavy legal charges that could
 keep him behind bars for more than 25 years.

 As Cooke tells it, he and his "ex," Beverly Lockhart, argued all
 through the evening of May 3, 1994. The couple's recent
 reunification was not going well, and it was becoming apparent to
 Cooke that they would soon break up again.  Kendall Cooke had
 been out of prison since 1990. He initially returned to his
 boyhood neighborhood of Inglewood. He relates that he was
 "hanging out" too much with his old "home boys" there, edging
 closer to the same self-destructive rut he had been in prior to
 prison.

 Cooke, who had married and divorced Beverly Lockhart in the
 mid-1980s, never really expected the couple's relationship to
 work again because, as he put it, "we'd been split up for six
 years. Things weren't the same; the same feelings were not
 there."

 But he badly wanted to get out of Inglewood. Even though he had
 been out of prison for 2 1/2 years without getting rearrested, he
 knew there was only trouble for him in his old neighborhood.

 Cooke and his mother, Dortha Ashley, literally got down on their
 knees and prayed, trying to decide what he should do. Ashley
 urged Cooke to give it another try with Lockhart. Cooke received
 permission from his parole officer to transfer to San Diego
 County, where Lockhart lived, for the final months of his parole.
 He moved in the fall of 1993.

 Things went well for him at first. He obtained a job with Volt
 Temporary Services. Vicky Morriman of Volt described the young
 man as a "super, super nice guy, nothing but polite."

 He began attending church every Sunday as well. Pastor David
 Statler said that Kendall first entered the Skyline Wesleyan
 Church on Easter Sunday morning.  "Kendall had lived the tough,
 L.A. street life all his life. He was seeking a way out -- a
 better way of life -- through the church," he said.  The Rev.
 Statler reported that Kendall immediately began to attend church
 services every Sunday. "Kendall was trying to start life with a
 clean sheet of paper. He was learning to live on the right side
 of life," he said.  Even Cooke's attempted reconciliation with
 his former wife started out well.  But the relationship was
 souring rapidly, and that night, says Cooke, Lockhart had
 threatened that if the couple broke up, she would contact his
 parole officer and have his parole revoked.

 Cooke left his home in the early morning hours of May 4,
 sleepless due to his nightlong argument with Lockhart and
 penniless for having spent his meager paycheck. "I just needed a
 beer," he said.

 At approximately 7:30 a.m., he entered the 7-Eleven store at 807
 East 8th Street in National City. He left with one, 16-ounce can
 of Coors Beer, valued at $1.14. Cooke hadn't paid for the beer.

 Store owner Alvin McKenzie caught up with Cooke in the parking
 lot and persuaded him to come back into the store. There, Cooke
 admitted to stealing the beer and calmly waited for the police to
 arrive to arrest him. After being read his rights by the police,
 he again confessed to his theft. All told, Cooke's apprehension
 by McKenzie and his repeat confession to 7-Eleven staff and
 police took about an hour. But the sentence for that single $1.14
 crime could keep keep him behind bars for life.

 Kendall James Cooke was born to Dortha and pastor James Cooke on
 Oct. 25, 1962.  Cooke's father left Dortha when the boy was 7 and
 his brother, Darnell, was 5.

 Dortha worked as a meat wrapper at Boy's Market and tried to
 raise her two sons as a single mother in Inglewood. When Kendall
 was 11, she met and married Eddie Ashley, a licensed construction
 worker.

 By all accounts, Ashley was an alcoholic who was extremely
 violent to Dortha and the boys. When Kendall Cooke was 15, Ashley
 badly beat him with an extension chord and ordered him out of the
 family's home. Kendall had accidentally damaged his stepfather's
 car while vacuuming it.

 Young Kendall was on his own from that day forward. "Kendall was
 a good child, but he went through a lot with his stepfather,"
 Dortha admitted. "When he got kicked out of the house, that's
 when he started getting into trouble." "I don't know why my momma
 married him [Ashley]," Cooke said, "but I think she had to stay
 with him because he had a good job and she just couldn't make it
 by herself."

 At the age of 18, Kendall Cooke found himself surviving in
 homeless hotels by doing odd jobs and acting as a "runner" -- or
 go-between -- on drug deals. One day, Cooke reports, he decided
 to skip out on a drug customer and keep his money without
 delivering any drugs to the man. To Cooke's surprise, the man
 turned him in and accused him of stealing the money through "fear
 and intimidation" -- the legal definition of strong-arm robbery.
 The man was unharmed, and no weapon was used or brandished.

 Noting that the alleged victim was uninjured and still wearing
 several gold chains following the reported robbery, Cooke relates
 that the police who arrested him were skeptical. Cooke was known
 in the neighborhood, and robbery was not his "M.O." Still, the
 police had a complaining witness, and a robbery arrest was made.

 Cooke's public defender was confident that they would beat the
 charge of robbery at trial, for it was the alleged victim's word
 against Cooke's. But the 18-year-old would have to wait in jail
 for two months until his trial. The district attorney was
 offering immediate probation in exchange for a guilty plea to
 robbery.

 Cooke was, after all, guilty of a misdemeanor theft (although
 probably not a felony robbery), and an immediate release was
 better than gambling at a trial two months later. He took the
 deal.

 Cooke's second "strike" involved even less forethought than his
 first. Needing a ride to his girlfriend's house in the San
 Fernando Valley from his apartment in Inglewood, Cooke spotted a
 car outside a convenience store. He reports that he impulsively
 jumped in and drove away as the car's owners were exiting the
 vehicle. He again pleaded guilty, and for this, his second
 robbery conviction, he was sentenced to five years in prison.

 Reactions to Cooke's current prospect of a life sentence are
 varied. Parole agent Jeffrey Thomas, who had supervised him,
 considered Cooke "not particularly dangerous" and noted that he
 would probably have received a four-to-six-month parole violation
 had he been arrested prior to the effective date of the "three
 strikes" law. Thomas had some harsh words to say about "three
 strikes" and the politicians who passed it:

 I think that the "three strikes" law should have been developed
 for guys who were violent offenders. Stealing a can of beer is
 not a violent offense. Most of the people who re-offend aren't
 violent offenders.

 The criminal act Cooke committed is de-escalating, not
 escalating. He hasn't gone from where he was to killing someone
 or attempting to kill someone.  [The "three strikes" law] is not
 a good way to go. It's a safe way to go, if I was a politician,
 meaning that I'm covering my ass in showing the public I
 attempted to do something.

 Alvin McKenzie, owner of the 7-Eleven Store from which Cooke
 stole the beer, disagreed. Angry that "these guys take money out
 of my pocket," McKenzie felt that "there is no maximum sentence a
 thief should get." He continued that some of the prisons he
 visited in Spain, in which prisoners had "no toilets and no
 beds," would be an improvement for California, whose prisons he
 considers "too cushy." He also volunteered that sanctions such as
 Singapore's caning would have merit locally.

 "Horrible, just horrible," says Volt's Vicky Morriman when she
 contemplates Cooke's threatened life sentence. "I thought it [the
 "three strikes" law] was only for violent offenders."

 "Kendall once saw himself as a criminal, and now he sees himself
 as someone who is loved by Christ," says Rev. Statler. "I'm
 praying that he is let out of jail so that he has a chance to
 prove himself."

 "I think the law is stupid," offers Cooke. "I could see if I
 murdered someone or hit a lady upside the head, but not for a can
 of beer."

 In the meantime, the battle continues to rage inside the
 courtroom over Cooke's case -- a debate that features arguments
 repeated in courthouses throughout California. At Cooke's
 preliminary hearing on June 29, 1994, Deputy Public Defender Jack
 Hochman asked the court to consider the Legislature's intent in
 passing the law. He recalled the debate in the Senate Judiciary
 Committee, where the "three-strikes" bill's sponsor, Assemblyman
 Bill Jones, "assures all members of the [Senate Judiciary]
 Committee this law will not be applied in cases such as this, nor
 in cases of stealing a bicycle, against someone having possession
 of a gram of cocaine or for forging a check for $10." Hochman
 continued:

 They further discussed it would not be used, in general, for
 thefts over $400.  They don't even get to petty thefts. They are
 saying it is targeted for much more serious felonies. ...

 [W]hat happens to the defendant before the court is the court's
 concern now, and I would ask the court to exercise its power. Mr.
 Cooke has been in jail for 66 days, I believe -- 90 days, with
 good-time credit. He was doing good in his life. He was working.
 I have confirmed his job. He was going to church.

 He had a bad night with his girlfriend and stayed up all night,
 and when he ran out of money, stole a beer, which I think was an
 impulsive act, after completing parole and, generally speaking,
 turned his life around.

 But in response, San Diego Deputy District Attorney Peter F.
 Murray argued that the law is quite clear, and that the judge has
 no choice but to sentence Cooke to life:

 Let me make clear for the record. Our opposition [to reducing
 Cooke's punishment] stems from what we read as we go through this
 law known as "three strikes," the 667 Penal Code section. What we
 find is that in granting the motion to reduce this charge, the
 court is, no matter how we look at it, going directly in
 contravention to the primacy language provided in Penal Code
 section 667, the "three strikes" law.

 That "three strikes" law has provided that it is to apply
 notwithstanding any other law, and we can argue all day long that
 that may seem inappropriate, but that is, in fact, the language
 as it currently stands, and as the elected Legislature has passed
 and made into law earlier this year.

 For a person like Mr. Cooke, he may have only stolen one can of
 beer on this day, but Mr. Cooke has been before the courts, and,
 specifically, as we offered to prove, with P.C. 211 [robbery]
 convictions in the State of California, Los Angeles County. He is
 the type of person that, whether we agree or not, is exactly
 encompassed with the provisions of "three strikes." The People of
 this State, through their elected representatives, have passed
 this law. If we don't agree with it, quite frankly, that is
 irrelevant, because it is the law, and the law says that when you
 have those kind of priors and you commit a subsequent felony ...
 he is subject to those enhancements.

 Murray said the theft of a can of beer may seem de minimus -- of
 little importance -- but "I don't see anything in 667 [the "three
 strikes" law] suggesting a relatively de minimus crime will be
 treated differently."

 The judge, Roy B. Cazares, ruled that the "three strikes" law is
 unconstitutional as it applies to Kendall Cooke's case. That
 decision is currently being appealed by the San Diego County
 district attorney's office.


                  =================================



 EDDIE JORDAN
 Charge: Petty theft with a prior conviction of theft
 Value of stolen goods: $32 (one men's shirt)

 Eddie Jordan, 33, of San Diego is a heroin addict who has spent
 years dealing with the consequences of his addiction. He is also
 a hard-working man trying to build a future for himself and the
 woman he loves. "I guess he's a good worker," says his parole
 officer, Jose Lopez, "because when I put him into a detox program
 or back to Donovan [Correctional Facility] for a dryout, he still
 manages to find work pretty quickly." In fact, it was Jordan's
 determination to find a job and work his way out of a run of bad
 luck that put him in jail facing the "three strikes" penalty.

 On September 15, at the Chula Vista J.C. Penney store, Eddie
 Jordan stole a shirt to wear the next day at a job interview.
 Ironically, he needed the shirt because his clothes had been
 stolen a short while before. It is for the theft of that shirt
 that he may spend the next few decades in prison.  When parole
 officer Lopez was asked if he thinks Jordan is a "violent and
 serious" criminal, he said the man wasn't like that at all. "He
 was into a lot of drugs, but as far as my supervision was
 concerned, he was low-key sort of a guy.  He is not aggressive at
 all.  Of course, most heroin addicts are laid-back kind of guys."

 Jordan comes from a very close family. His siblings have also
 also had their share of troubles, but Jordan blames only himself
 for his own misdeeds.  He has an older brother and sister and a
 younger brother and sister. One of his brothers has a much more
 serious criminal history than Eddie but has been doing well since
 his release from prison in 1981. Eddie Jordan is so close to his
 siblings that, he reports, in 1992 he "took a conviction" for
 possession of crystal methamphetamine for sale to save his sister
 from possible charges. The methamphetamine was found in the house
 he shared with his sister, and Jordan is a heroin user and
 doesn't do crystal. Rather than take the chance that his sister
 would be charged, he "took the fall," he says.

 Jordan's mother, Martha, and father got divorced when Eddie was 4
 years old.  Martha recalls that Eddie was always very nervous
 when he was going to visit with his father, but he couldn't
 explain why. In later years the family has had discussions about
 the kids blaming Martha for her husband's departure; they now
 have come to believe that it was their father who abandoned them,
 leaving their mother to raise them all.

 Martha Jordan remarried, to a man that Eddie says "was a good man
 who always treated me fair. I got a lot of respect for him."
 Jordan shakes his head and sighs deeply. "Even when he told me I
 couldn't live at the house no more, he had warned me earlier that
 I could have one more chance but that if I messed up again, that
 was it. So even that was on me." Jordan says that
 straightforwardly, adding: "I had my chance and blew it."

 Jordan played baseball beginning in grade school and did fine
 academically until about his sophomore year in high school, when
 he started having problems.  One family member thinks that one of
 the kids' uncles was the person who first turned the children on
 to dope and then had them selling it for him. Because there was
 no work for his stepfather, the family moved to Yuma, Ariz., in
 1980, returning to Chula Vista in 1981. After they returned,
 Jordan finished his education, graduating from Montgomery High
 School.

 It was about that time that he became addicted to heroin. As he
 tells it, it wasn't supposed to happen that way. "When I was 18,
 before we went to Arizona, I had this beautiful Cadillac that was
 cherry [in mint condition]. I put all my money into that ride. So
 I started off just selling dope here and there, thinking that I'd
 never use it myself." He shakes his head and looks you right in
 the eye with a look of self-deprecation. "What a joke."

 His first "strike" came for a 1982 residential burglary. He
 needed money for heroin. "I was hooked bad, and my regular job
 couldn't keep up with my Jones (addiction)," he reports. He kicks
 back in his chair in the San Diego County jail interview room and
 laughs out loud. "I make a lousy thief. I just barely even got
 out of the house before the cops were there." He was sent to the
 California Rehabilitation Center (CRC), which was developed to
 provide program services for addicts while they were in prison.
 "The program was pretty good, you know," Jordan acknowledged,
 "but you've got to stay with the NA [Narcotics Anonymous] and
 12-stepping when you get out. I did pretty good for a while, but
 then I started sliding again."

 In 1984, he was helping to fix what he thought was a relative's
 truck. The relative, he says, had neglected to tell him that the
 truck was actually stolen. They were both convicted of receiving
 stolen property, and Jordan went to prison again. "But I got to
 go back to CRC," he recalls, "so all in all it might have done me
 some good." He grins at the thought. "At least I stayed clean in
 the joint." Since receiving stolen property is not considered a
 "serious" felony, it does not count as a "strike," but it does
 count as a prior prison term for the purpose of sentence
 enhancement, even without the "three strikes" law.

 In a year, he was again paroled. After a few months of not being
 able to find a job, he got depressed and went back to using. He
 got addicted again and was arrested for being under the influence
 of a controlled substance.

 In 1986, he was caught for his second strike -- another
 residential burglary.  "But it was such a lame beef," he said,
 "that in spite of my priors they gave me probation and six months
 in jail." It seems ironic that an offense that the authorities
 did not think was worth putting Jordan in prison for at the time
 may now help put him there for life.

 Within months of his release, he was strung out again. "You know,
 I would be a rich man if I had a dollar for every time I tried to
 get into a decent program.  I've even had my parole agent out
 there beating the bushes for me," he says appreciatively, "but
 unless you got some big bucks or some juice somewhere, it takes
 you forever and a day. Those programs all have waiting lists a
 mile long." He shakes his head again. "What junkie can wait?"

 Then, nearly five years ago, Jordan got into a long-term
 relationship with Wendy (a pseudonym). She was a young,
 unattached mother who became a source of stability for him, and
 they have been making plans to live together. When you ask Jordan
 when he met Wendy, he answers immediately, "March 11, 1990." When
 you ask Wendy when she met Jordan, she answers immediately,
 "March 11, 1990." Neither answer reflects that they have known
 each other for years; neither answer reflects that each one's
 mother was already the grandmother of the same child, born to
 Wendy's brother and Jordan's sister. But they didn't really know
 each other, and had never even thought about dating until the day
 Jordan was released on parole -- March 11, 1990.

 When interviewers caught up with her, she and her mother were in
 the kitchen of Wendy's condominium cooking dinner. As soon as we
 explained we were there to talk about Jordan, Wendy's mother
 began spewing a mouthful of cold-steel invective against Jordan.
 From her point of view, Jordan is a "no-good thief ... a filthy
 convict ... a man without honor, integrity or brains" and "the
 worst thing that ever happened" to her daughter. Wendy's brothers
 are convicts, too, and one of them is currently facing a violent
 third-strike charge of his own. Says their mother, "I'm their
 mother. How could I not love them?"

 "Face it, Mom, your son is much worse than Eddie and you still
 love him," Wendy says as she holds out her hands plaintively,
 palms outstretched, "so why can't you understand that I love
 Eddie the same way?"

 Possibly the mother was hoping for something better for her
 daughter. But after five minutes, Wendy took her guest outside to
 talk and escape her mother's verbal torrent. "There is real bad
 blood between our families," she explained, "and it has nothing
 to do with Eddie." It seems it is about the baby that joins the
 grandmothers. Custodial squabbles about the young girl have
 apparently resulted in a "Hatfields and McCoys" feud between the
 grandmothers that has fallen on the younger generation as well.

 Except for Wendy and Eddie. When Wendy talks about Jordan, there
 is palpable caring and wistfulness. "You know, I'm all he has,"
 she begins, and then her eyes start to sparkle and she wipes away
 a tear, then another. Then she doesn't even bother. "His folks
 don't really care for him. You see what my mother thinks. But
 he's not like Mom was saying at all. He's really so different
 from my brothers."

 On that March day in 1990, Jordan's sister had invited Wendy over
 for his prison homecoming party. Watching him really for the
 first time, and talking to him, Wendy liked him right away.

 She says the first thing that struck her about him was that
 unlike most other convicts she knew, Jordan was ashamed of being
 an addict. The more they talked, not just that day but
 thereafter, the more she came to like his personality. He was
 quiet and respectful, sort of shy and conservative. He was
 curious about things, and he seemed more mature, not foolish and
 irresponsible. "He was just different from most of my brothers'
 friends," Wendy said.

 "And there was this other thing that I love about him, too," she
 remarked.  "When he was still living at [his parents' home and
 working steady, we would go to Disneyland or the beach or park or
 some place with my kids. He didn't try to buy their love or
 affection. He told me one time that he wants them to just have
 fun with him, and that if we all did fun things together, he
 would win their affection that way. He wasn't pushy about it like
 other guys I've dated."

 Wendy has never used drugs, and she made it clear to Jordan that
 she wanted to help him quit. For a while, it seemed to be working
 out. Jordan was employed full-time by a painting contractor that
 he really liked, and the company liked him. Wendy worked for the
 State Department of Economic Development, in an unemployment
 unit, and also made good money.

 Then came the prison term in 1992. "That was a real bummer,"
 Wendy says. "It was a very shaky case, but Eddie didn't want it
 to fall back on his sister, so he agreed it was his dope."

 "But better me than her, you know," Jordan says with a shrug of
 his shoulders.  "She's never been down, and what's one more time
 for me?" He served eight months in prison for that decision.

 When he was released, they got lucky again. He got another good
 job, with a different painting contractor, this time in El Cajon.
 His boss, Dave Wageman, had a list of people he would call, and
 the workers' position on the list depended on how well they did
 their work and how well they responded when called. Jordan was a
 good worker, and as long as he had a car he could respond to
 wherever the job site was.

 Then Wendy got conned. She fell for what dope fiends call the
 "okee doke." The way she tells it, her brother pleaded with her
 to help him stay clean while he was desperately trying to find a
 job -- no easy task for an ex-con. All he needed was some money
 to tide him over, and couldn't she please just make a couple of
 entries in the computer at work so he could qualify for
 unemployment?  Out of love and pity, she says, she did it. A
 short time later, he wanted her to do it for a friend. She
 refused. He reported her to her superiors, and she lost her job.
 At the same time, her mother had problems of her own and moved in
 with Wendy.

 "That put too much pressure on me," she recalls, "and I guess I
 didn't have energy left over for Eddie." In January 1994, Jordan
 tested positive for heroin use and was sent back to Donovan
 Correctional Facility for what parole agents call "a 30-day
 dryout."

 When Jordan got out at the end of February, his stepfather told
 him that this was his last chance. If he used dope again, he
 would have to move out of his parents' house. At the same time,
 he had been dropped to the bottom of Wageman's hiring list.
 Because of a general slump in the economy, Wageman wasn't getting
 enough jobs to reach the bottom of the list. Jordan got only an
 occasional day of work. Then, on March 19, he was arrested again
 by the San Diego police for being under the influence of a
 controlled substance. That's when Eddie had to leave his house
 because of the understanding with his parents that he would not
 be living there if he used drugs again. He was now officially
 homeless.

 Whenever he could afford it, he stayed in cheap motels. When he
 couldn't, he either flopped with friends or stayed in someone's
 car. He was going out with Wendy just on Saturday nights. "You
 know," he said, "it was just like that old joke. Wendy told me,
 `Cheer up, things could be worse.' So I cheered up, and sure
 enough things got worse." His car quit running while he was on
 the freeway, and before he was able to get back to fix it, it was
 impounded. Now he had no way to get to a job even when Dave
 Wageman was able to offer him one. "I thought to myself, you
 know, if it wasn't for bad luck I wouldn't have no luck at all."

 But with strong support from Wendy, he was clean until about two
 weeks before his arrest. Then he got an abscessed tooth. He went
 to the public hospital but couldn't get an appointment with a
 dentist for several days. He couldn't handle the pain from the
 tooth, so he shot up some heroin for the pain. "But I had it
 under control, you know," he rationalizes. "I took just enough
 for the pain. I wasn't going to let the monkey get on my back
 again. I just know that if I had made that job interview they
 would have hired me."

 Jordan is referring to an interview he had lined up for the day
 after he was arrested for his third strike. But that day, with
 the bad luck that seems to dog him, he was ripped off. Jordan had
 stashed the two garbage bags with his clothes in a clump of
 bushes while he went out to get some food and to line up more job
 interviews. When he came back, the bags had been stolen and his
 clothes were gone. He had the job interview to go to and had only
 the clothes he was wearing. He felt he needed at least a clean
 shirt for the interview.  "You know something, I never had been
 off parole since 1982," Jordan said at the close of the
 interview. "Maybe I'm nuts, but I'm kind of proud of the fact
 that since 1986 I haven't done no more burglaries. When I went
 into that J.C. Penney store, I really thought God was on my side
 and that He wanted me to get that job the next day."

 Jordan stuffed a new shirt into his trousers and was apprehended
 just after leaving Penney's without paying. He confessed, offered
 no resistance, and calmly waited for police to arrive.

 All that remained was to sort out what society should do with
 him, and the manager of the Penney's from which Eddie Jordan had
 stolen the new shirt has very definite feelings about the matter.
 "You must understand, I'm a very conservative person," said the
 trim, almost dapper man in his 50s, who prefers that his name not
 be used. "I think the prison system is sadly misguided. For many
 of these people, they have it much better inside than they do at
 home.  They get clean clothes, three meals a day, all the showers
 they want, television -- everything."

 "How would you change that?" the manager was asked.

 "I think they should get two meals a day, no television, a shower
 and clean clothes once a week, no weights so they can't pump
 themselves and come back out to beat up the rest of us. Make it
 painful to be in there," the manager replied. "Then they'll think
 twice about committing another crime and getting sent back."

 What should the prisoners do all day?

 "Let them make little rocks out of big rocks," he said.

 The Penney's manager was unstoppable. He talked of the "three
 strikes" initiative, the state of the schools and neighborhoods,
 immigration, politicians, Christianity and crime rates. The
 conversation worked its way around to the finances of
 incarceration and the projected cost of three-quarters of a
 million dollars each to keep offenders like Eddie Jordan off the
 streets for 25 years to life -- for a $32 shirt theft. "If the
 cost keeps going up and up," the Penney's manager asked
 indignantly, "who is going to pay the piper? Obviously, taxes
 will have to be increased and new taxes will have to be imposed."

 He considered for a while the balancing of social costs and
 concluded, "I want to discuss these facts with some of my
 friends. We may have to think about this issue some more. As a
 businessman, maybe I need to recheck the bottom line."

 Jordan's parole officer Lopez also has given some thought to the
 bottom line.  What puzzles him is that since quadrupling the
 number of state prisoners over the past 15 or so years hasn't
 brought the crime rate down, "then why all the hysteria to lock
 up so many more guys? I mean, if putting four times the number of
 people in prison hasn't lowered the crime rate, what is going to
 change except that we spend more money?"

 "And you know," he closes, "it would be nice to have some program
 money for people like Eddie.  I mean, some serious program money
 for some serious programs, not just the short-term programs we
 have now."

 #   #   #

 According to his parole agent, Jose Lopez, "Eddie is just a
 hope-to-die doper.  He's easy to supervise because he comes out,
 reports to me once, then the next time I see him is when he
 starts taking dope again.  Heroin is his drug of choice," says
 the former Santa Barbara probation officer [he isn't currently a
 parole officer?], "and he just can't seem to stay away from it
 for very long.  Lopez says that Jordan has been lucky to find a
 pretty good job, usually construction work of some kind or, more
 recently, painting.  This is unusual for most of a parole agent's
 caseload, who are often chronically unemployed.


                  =================================



 VINCENT DELGADO
 Charge: Petty theft with a prior conviction of theft
 Value of stolen goods: $62.05 (miscellaneous hand tools)

 Vincent Delgado, says one of his brothers, "is very bright,
 quick." Sergeant Bill Moore of the Brentwood Police Department,
 who has known Delgado for years and once arrested him for a
 residential burglary, calls him "extremely bright."

 Delgado's attorney, Suzanne Chapot, says, "I have spent a great
deal of time with Mr. Delgado; he is a very bright young man."

 "Smart?" says Delgado himself in an interview room of the Contra
 Costa County jail in Martinez. "I'd consider myself pretty
 intelligent, but smart? No. I've made a lot of stupid decisions."

 The 27-year-old's most recent stupid decision was to steal $62.05
 of screwdrivers, pliers and wrenches from a Payless store in
 Oakley, Calif. He took the tools to get money for his next heroin
 fix, and soon after he was stopped near the store's front door he
 admitted to a police officer that he was under the influence of
 heroin. Delgado, an addict since his teenage years, says he had a
 $40-to-$60-a-day habit.

 Delgado's police record includes several auto thefts and a string
 of seven daytime residential burglaries in 1989. They are the
 "strikes" that could send the young man to prison for 25 years to
 life under the "three strikes" law that went into effect nine
 days before his arrest at Payless.

 The seven residential burglaries that are listed as priors all
 occurred within a several-week stretch when Delgado was 22 years
 old.  None involved violence.  In each case, he says, he looked
 for signs that the houses were unoccupied, then knocked on the
 door and broke in only after determining that no one was home.
 Whenever anyone answered the door, he "played campesino," asking
 for directions to a fictitious place in a "a 50-cent Mexican
 accent," then quickly departed.

 Delgado stole mostly stereos, VCRs and other appliances he could
resell easily at nearby farm labor camps for the cash to buy dope.

 During every one of those burglaries, says Delgado, he was either
 high on heroin or in urgent need of a fix. "I'm in a desperation
 mode. I'm waking up sick, and I'm doing these asinine jobs." The
 pattern of "waking up sick" every morning and "getting well"
 (getting a fix) started early for Vincent Delgado, and everyone
 who knows him says that the key to his future lies in getting a
 grip on his years-long addiction and removing himself from the
 environment that fed his addictive behavior. Delgado agrees, and
 he says he has begun to grapple with the issue in earnest: "It's
 a crossroads in my own life that I've come to."

 Vincent Delagdo was about 10 when his large family moved from
 California's Central Valley to Byron, a small town near Brentwood
 in Contra Costa County.  They were a traditional Mexican-American
 family -- devout, hard-working people.  There were nine children
 in the family; Vincent was No. 7. It was not easy to get
 attention in such a large family, and Vincent's brother Manual
 speculates that his brother felt left out. Manual, in fact, used
 the same words his mother, Amada, used in a separate interview to
 describe Vincent's childhood --"he got lost in the shuffle."

 Vincent's father, Chrispine, is a hard-working truckdriver who
 was usually on the road, and the children never felt they knew
 him well. When he did come home, says Ronald, another brother, he
 "was less than patient" with his children. He had high standards
 for his kids, and many of the disciplinary problems accumulated
 until "Pops" got home to straighten things out. Although Ronald
 remembers his father as a critical person back then, the boys all
 stress that they have enormous respect for their father and never
 suffered any abuse.  "He's a good man," says Vincent, "and a good
 provider."

 Amada Delgado had her hands full with the nine children. As if
 she wasn't busy enough around the house, Mrs. Delgado
 supplemented the family's income for much of Vincent's young
 years by working as a Head Start teacher, leaving the kids with a
 babysitter.

 Nevertheless, Vincent displayed some unique talents. The quiet
 boy did well in school in his early years. He showed great
 artistic ability and at times dreamed of being an artist. Once, a
 drawing of his submitted to the San Francisco Chronicle was
 printed in the "Junior Art Champion" feature, and Vincent still
 remembers the morning he was awakened by relatives and shown his
 prize-winning drawing in the newspaper. He received a $2 check,
 and he recalls, "I was proud as a peacock." Manual Delgado says,
 "I always thought he'd be an artist."

 It is a measure of Vincent Delgado's dramatically changed
 circumstances that he later took to selling his striking artwork
 to fellow prisoners for cigarettes.

 When the Delgado family moved to Northern California, the
 children had to make a new set of friends, and, says Ronald
 Delgado, some of Vincent's new friends were "not exactly role
 models." He began to get into scrapes -- fighting, trouble with
 teachers. In time, Vincent started indulging in alcohol and
 drugs.  He says that relatives who lived in Mexican border areas
 where illegal drugs were more plentiful introduced him to some of
 those drugs. Several of his siblings were also doing drugs.

 At the age of 15, Vincent had his first shot of heroin. "I was
 very, very impressionable at that age," he says. By 17, he was
 hooked.  He was on heroin from then on, with only brief respites
 during a truncated stint in the army and during his subsequent
 imprisonments.

 Vincent Delgado also got something of a reputation locally as a
 boxer, and he dreamed of being the welterweight champion of the
 world.  "I was a natural fighter," he says, and he loved the
 sport, which he first tried when his father bought the boys
 boxing gloves and a punching bag. A local rancher got him
 interested in taking up the sport more seriously and even drove
 him to the Little C Athletic Club in neighboring Concord for
 training. He was to be on Little C's boxing team, but the long
 commute became too much to sustain and he dropped out.

 Mostly what Delgado did in high school was hang out with the
 local circle of low riders, primping and strutting and drinking
 and getting into scuffles and passing the time of day. At the
 small regional high school, said James Martinez, Delgado's close
 friend during those years, there were a number of cliques -- not
 gangs, although some of the Mexican groups evolved into today's
 tough gangs.  Martinez said, "The athletic guys all hung out
 together, the cowboys hung out together, the studious people hung
 out together, and the homeboys hung out together -- that was our
 group." Cholos, they called themselves.

 Their style of dress was "completely different from the rest of
 the school," Martinez said in an interview. They all wore white
 T-shirts and khaki or black pants, and they sported slicked-back
 hair. Above all else, they valued their "respect." "Someone
 commented about your dress or how you combed your hair and you'd
 punch him out," said Martinez. "If someone did something we
 didn't like, we beat them up. People feared us, but we thought
 they respected us. We were punks; we were shitheads."

 Martinez says that Delgado "did no more fighting than any of the
 rest of us," and in those high school years the members of the
 tight little circle were not into robbing and stealing.

 Martinez brings an interesting perspective to Delgado's story. He
 saw his friend daily during high school; he cut school with him;
 he drank beer with him; he hung out with him. If there was any
 difference between their paths in high school, Martinez recalls,
 it was that he got in trouble with his parents for cutting
 school, and it was his impression that Delgado did not. "My
 parents were a lot more strict than his," he says. "He came and
 went as he pleased; didn't have to go home any time or answer to
 anyone."

 Basically, "we were the same kind of person until we were 17 or
 18," he says, but Delgado "went one way, and I went the other."
 Today Martinez is a police officer in Brentwood. "I was the kind
 of person I go out and arrest now." And indeed, he once chased
 and caught Delgado in a stolen park and recreation department
 truck.

 Delgado, he says, "never got out of the environment."

 Delgado himself confirms the importance that the homeboy mystique
 had for him, and he sees in his high school behavior the origins
 of his present troubles. "I fed off the attention I got for being
 a cholo," he says. "I think with a little more guidance in my
 younger years ... if somebody would have took me back then and
 said, `Why don't you try the art work or sports or pep club for
 that matter?  When you get into high school, why don't you try
 this?' When I got into high school, I was basically on my own. We
 were just new into the area, and I wanted to be accepted ...
 accepted as a person on these terms and these terms only. And my
 way of thinking was, `Well, the best way to go about this is to
 develop some type of reputation. Hence all the fighting and
 whatnot."

 He says of the cholo lifestyle: "I wanted to be known for that.
That was going to be my imprint on my surroundings."

 Martinez believes that Delgado's heroin use was an extension of
 his desire for respect. He recalls the time Delgado came back
 from a visit to Southern Californa, bragging to him about the
 partying scene there and about shooting up heroin for the first
 time.

 The officer also points out that Delgado went to prison very
 young. "It made him a tough guy around the neighborhood," he
 said, and "he acted as if it's cool" to have gone to prison.

 "I send people to prison now; that's what I do for a living,"
 said Martinez, but "I don't believe you get rehabilitated in
 prison. It just makes it worse."

 In addition, in Delgado's case, life could have got "very
 uncomfortable for him in prison," Martinez said. That's because
 the Mexican American population in prison is divided into two
 main gangs, representing Northern California and Southern
 California. As a southerner who moved north, and as someone who
 did time in both Northern and Southern California, Delgado would
 have been under great pressure, says Martinez. "There's no option
 for these young Mexicans," he says. "Either you go with one gang
 or the other or you're someone's punk."

 If prison couldn't change Vincent Delgado, what could? Martinez
 says it will happen only if he makes up his mind -- "he's never
 had any reason to change" --and then he will "have to completely
 cut himself off from everybody he knows and get away from there."
 Martinez has his doubts that Delgado can do that.

 But Delgado independently says he's going through just such a
 rethinking during his current incarceration. "It goes back to
 what my father's always telling me.  He says, `Vincent, you've
 got so much potential' and this and that. And I'm tired -- I'm
 not tired of hearing that, I'm tired of spinning my own wheels on
 it. I want to see what I can do. And I want to do what I know I
 can do. I really don't want to let this life pass me by."

 He says he can't yet "fathom what it would take ... what it will
 take ... " but he has the rudiments of a plan for success. It
 starts with his family. He wants to reaffirm close ties with them
 if and when he gets out. Previously when he was released from
 prison, he "never asked anybody else for help. I never admitted I
 had a drug problem." Now, he says, he recognizes he needs someone
 to lean on, to help him, which is why during his current
 incarceration, for the first time ever, he asked his parents to
 visit him in jail. In the past, they had always wanted to visit
 him, but he had never before consented.

 And if he gets the opportunity, he wants to go back to school.
 "Knowledge is beautiful," he says. "History really interests me."
 And then there is his natural talent for art.

 But he has no grandiose expectations for himself of the kind that
 sometimes has gotten him in trouble in the past. He says he wants
 to live "what other people would term a very, very dull life; and
 seeking those interests that I always knew were very interesting
 to me but never took the initiative and stepped forward to
 pursue. ... I'm a people person. I don't want to go out and save
 the world -- I'm not the Mexican Joan of Arc or anything like
 that -- but maybe I could start a noble cause or help with one. I
 certainly don't want to go back to where I came from."

 These thoughts have been rattling around in Delgado's head since
 his most recent stay in a halfway house, the Volunteers of
 America Work-Training Program in West Oakland, where he came
 under the influence of a counselor named Roy Mays, who "made me
 take a very good look at myself" and had a simple but effective
 message for the 27-year-old heroin addict. It's time, he told
 Delgado, for him to love himself, to see value in his own life
 and stop seeking it through through external substances. Months
 later, Delgado still talks of Mays and his insights.

 Mays, in an interview, said that with consistent support Delgado
 is a good candidate for rehabilitation in a program emphasizing
 abstinence, life skills and self-esteem. Without that support, he
 said, Delgado will fall back into the familiar, self-destructive
 habits that are all he knows. He says Delgado has been "playing
 Russian roulette with his life. He enjoys living on the edge."
 The alternative sounds a lot like the boring life for which
 Delgado now says he yearns.

 Delgado says he was never prepared for the future, that he was
 "blindfolded." So his interviewers asked what society should do
 with people like him besides throw them in prison for life. He
 replied, citing what he said was an old African proverb, that
 "`it takes a whole village to raise a child.' We raised this
 generation. ... These kids are all the product of what we made
 them, whether it's through the ghetto or whether it's through MTV
 gangster rap videos beamed out to suburbia. We made them."

 "I wish," he goes on, with a passion that grew steadily in
 intensity as the jail interview proceeded, "that society could
 take me under a microscope and judge me for what I am, like you
 two [interviewers] are doing. But I don't think that will
 happen."

 What will happen, barring some unexpected boon from the court
 system or the Legislature, is several more decades in prison.
 Nobody who knows Delgado thinks that long a stretch behind bars
 will do him any good. "He might as well die in there," said
 Ronald Delgado, who thinks his brother had finally begun to
 "mellow out."

 "I think the `three strikes' is a good law for some people -- for
 violent crime or crimes against a person," said Officer Martinez.
 "But I don't think 25 years is the right punishment for stealing
 tools -- not for shoplifting, no." He says "maybe five or six
 years" sounds about right to him.  Delgado's attorney, Suzanne
 Chapot, says that without the "three strikes' legislation Delgado
 might have gotten a sentence of 16 months, or at most two years.

 Amada Delgado blames the judges and lawmakers who "were up there
 trying to act like God and doing a bad job of it. They are
 saying, `Well, this is as far as you go -- your life is over.
 You're going to be incarcerated for the rest of it.' And that
 doesn't seem right. Vincent has a problem with drugs, you know.
 He's not violent. As far as I know he hasn't hurt anybody." But,
 she says, he was always released from prison to "the same life,"
 with no effective programs to help him.

 Vincent Delgado says there is a limit to what society can put up
 with -- the "rapists, armed robbers, murders" -- but he does not
 put himself in the same category. He expresses his situation in
 metaphorical terms. The "three strikes" law, he says, "is almost
 like the net and the fish" -- the environmental problem of
 dolphins being killed in nets intended for other fish. "And I
 almost feel like one of the dolphins being killed. And sometimes
 I don't think I'll ever get to play in the water any more."

 Although the "three strikes" legislation was designed to
 eliminate plea bargains, Delgado was offered a deal by the
 district attorney's office -- they would strike one of his
 "priors" if he accepted a six-year prison term. He turned it down
 because "I don't think that was a viable option for the crime.
 People come in here and they do 30 days for what I did. If I had
 to double the sentence, that would be fine" ... or triple, or
 quadruple. "But six years, not that."

 As Delgado speculates about his future, he depicts a potential
 scenario in his mind that perhaps contributed to his refusal to
 accept the deal proffered by the DA's office. "They send me to
 some godawful penitentiary, and I'm back acting with the [prison]
 politics.  And I get a big, thick, calloused skin, a facade, over
 me, and I slowly turn into one of these prison-made monsters
 --just waste away my life in there."

 The man who "wasn't prepared for the future" and had finally
 begun to hope that he might make one for himself, sees a cruel
 parallel between his own life of heroin and the newly enacted
 crime nostrum that haunts his future:  "I'm society. ... The
 solutions to my [personal] problems were a quick fix [of heroin].
 And just like society in the `three strikes,' we're all looking
 for a quick-fix solution: Gas 'em, three strikes, lock 'em up,
 take away their welfare. ... I want to try that virtue called
 patience. I want to satisfy myself with a hard day of work."


                  =================================



 EDWARD J. MORRISON
 Charge: Escape without violence

 In the weeks following enactment of the "three strikes"
 legislation in March, Edward Morrison had an increasingly tenuous
 grip on sanity, according to officials at the prison where he was
 incarcerated. What it was that triggered his "third strike" crime
 we may never know, but the results will probably be the same
 whether or not he has the presence to tell his own story.

 Unlike the other defendants profiled in this report, Edward
 Morrison was never interviewed by a researcher from the Center on
 Juvenile and Criminal Justice.  Morrison was "in the hole" --
 administrative segregation -- when his private investigator
 attempted to obtain his permission for our interview.  At the
 time of our request, Morrison had been in isolation for more than
 five months. When the investigator asked him to sign the simple
 release form granting permission for a CJCJ researcher to
 interview him, Morrison was so paranoid that he refused to sign
 the form.

 "That's a lot of time to be in the hole," said Morrison's defense
attorney, Jim Maguire.

 Morrison is and has been in isolation for so long because his
 third "strike" came when he was a state prison inmate. It is the
 policy of the California Department of Corrections (CDC) to place
 inmates who are accused of new offenses while in prison in
 administrative segregation until their cases are resolved.
 Because cases normally were resolved through guilty pleas prior
 to the advent of the "three strikes" law, this policy has not
 resulted in excessive overcrowding in segregation units
 statewide. "Third-strike" cases, which almost invariably result
 in trials and not guilty pleas, may change all that.

 On March 31, 1994, Edward Morrison left prison for less than one
 day. He had been acting increasingly "strange," according to
 prison staff, in the days leading up to his walkaway from the
 minimum-security section of the California Men's Colony in San
 Luis Obispo.  According to a report written by Correctional
 Officer E.R. Geoiran:

 During the last two weeks Inmate Morrison E-72413, Dorm 20 Bed
 43U has been observed to stay up all night and read and study his
 bible. He also prowl the dorm at night when possible and wakes up
 inmates telling them that he is blessing them. On March 31 at
 approximately 0300 hours he woke up his inmate neighbor and told
 him he was blessing him. He has been warned in the past and
 written a Disciplinary CDC-115 regarding his behavior. Morrison
 was also told to change his sleeping habits to sleep during the
 night instead of during the day. On March 26 at about 1300 hours
 he made what appeared to be an alter on his bed. He opened his
 bible and other religious books, set them up and stood back
 staring at them for an hour. He then took them down and walked
 out of the dorm. [Errors in original.]

 On the date of Morrison's "non-violent escape," as his offense is
 called, prison guard D. Peterson noticed Morrison within two feet
 of the prison's front gate. According to his report, "I yelled at
 him to get away from the gate.  Inmate Morrison turned around and
 walked away, not saying anything." About seven hours later, at
 approximately 4:30 on the afternoon of March 31, Morrison was
 "out of place" when prison officials took their daily inmate
 "count." By 3:00 the next morning Morrison turned up at a gas
 station in Pismo Beach, less than 10 miles from the prison's
 gates. He had stopped to buy a pack of gum and answer a "help
 wanted" sign posted in the station's window.

 Because Morrison won't talk to us in his current condition,
 little is known about his background, and many mysteries remain
 about why a man in a minimum-security prison with little more
 than a month to serve on a six-month parole violation would risk
 a new felony conviction on an escape charge. Upon arrest,
 Morrison reported that he had escaped to see his mother in an
 old-age home where the woman's health was reportedly failing.

 But Morrison did not get to his mother's retirement home.
 Instead, he was spotted at two locations during his fewer than 12
 hours in the free world -- at a g