I always thought that habitual offender laws and three strikes laws emerged in the 1990s as part of the tough-on-crime era. But then I was looking through old state codes and I saw a three strikes law from 1923. Then I found dozens from around this time, and wondered (naively) what was going on. - ThreadSky

danielloehr.bsky.social • 8 days ago

I always thought that habitual offender laws and three strikes laws emerged in the 1990s as part of the tough-on-crime era. But then I was looking through old state codes and I saw a three strikes law from 1923. Then I found dozens from around this time, and wondered (naively) what was going on.

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pygalge.bsky.social•7 days ago

I hadn't realized that. Thanks for doing and reporting the research.
One has to wonder what it would have been like if the Social Darwinists hadn't hijacked eugenics in that period.

rumpolebayou.bsky.social•6 days ago

Did they also call it “3 strikes”? Weird that a baseball rule determines who goes to prison for life. If baseball had 4 strikes to get out, people would need 4 convictions for life.

danielloehr.bsky.social•8 days ago

What I found was that these laws were a product of the eugenics movement. Eugenicists believed that people who committed multiple crimes were likely “genetic criminals” such that they could not be cured, and that they would pass criminality to their offspring if allowed to reproduce.

katzish.bsky.social•7 days ago

That’s so interesting—did not know this history

jstephenclark.bsky.social•2 days ago

Yes. See Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942)—three strikes and you’re sterilized.

danielloehr.bsky.social•8 days ago

Based on this belief, eugenicists across the country advocated for three strikes laws and similar habitual offender laws to stop “habitual criminals” from reproducing. Eugenicists debated whether they should use sterilization or long sentences as the tool for eradicating “habitual criminals.”

danielloehr.bsky.social•8 days ago

On balance, eugenicists preferred sentencing to sterilization because it was a tool that faced less backlash. Habitual offender and three strikes laws passed in 42 states in the first half of the 1900. And when the Nazi party came to power in Germany, they quickly passed a three strikes law.

danielloehr.bsky.social•8 days ago

So, the takeaway is that habitual offender laws did not emerge from the tough on crime era in the late 1900s, but instead from the eugenics movement in the early 1900s. The Howard Law Journal published my research on this last month.

kennysmith.bsky.social•7 days ago

Where would the more recent use of the term recidivism, and all which that implies, figure into this, do you think?

danielloehr.bsky.social•8 days ago

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5159292

danielloehr.bsky.social•8 days ago

I also worked with The Sentencing Project to publish a report on this topic. https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/the-eugenic-origins-of-three-strikes-laws-how-habitual-offender-sentencing-laws-were-used-as-a-means-of-sterilization/

degorius.bsky.social•7 days ago

Awesome. I will read this. As you likely know, predictive policing algorithms are formulated very similarly. They can be traced back to a few well-funded academics whose sketchy experiments in Minnesota are still impacting domestic violence laws. My brain explodes on this stuff.

hotwxtakes.bsky.social•7 days ago

yeah. the "anti-socials" thing. as late as the early 1800s, people were afraid to be TOUCHED by a habitual criminal. The Third Reich in History and Memory has a great chapter on this "Social Outsiders" https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Third_Reich_in_History_and_Memory.html?id=xBxcBgAAQBAJ

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