Three strikes and you're in for life: stealing so much as a slice of pizza can mean life in prison under a controversial law. Is it fair? The Supreme Court will decide.

• Author: Vilbig, Peter

Slipping the three golf clubs down his pants leg was the easy part. The hard part was walking out of the golf shop with the $1,200 worth of hidden merchandise, and there Gary A. Ewing failed. A clerk noticed Ewing limping out and dialed 911. When the police spotted him in a nearby parking lot, Ewing was still limping.

Shoplifting is generally considered a minor crime, a misdemeanor, punishable by no more than a year in jail. But Ewing had prior convictions for burglary and robbery, serious crimes known as felonies. Under California's "three strikes and you're out" law, prosecutors upgraded Ewing's case to a felony--and a third felony conviction automatically carries a sentence of 25 years to life. Ewing was packed off to prison.

A life sentence for shoplifting? Attorneys for Ewing and another three-strikes inmate in California have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the three-strikes law violates the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlaws "cruel and unusual punishments."

DOING TIME FOR VIDEO THEFT

The high-profile case has reopened a national debate over what is fair punishment for crimes, just as the U.S. crime rate, after dropping steeply through much of the 1990s, began inching up again last year.

Supporters of the three-strikes law say the lengthy sentences target so-called habitual offenders, getting them off the streets and making communities safer. During oral arguments on the case at the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia said that Ewing "is precisely the kind of person you want to get off the streets. He's going to do it again."

But critics argue that sending thousands of petty criminals to prison for decades does little to reduce serious crime, while jamming the prisons and costing taxpayers millions. They point to the case of the other prisoner in the Supreme Court case, Leandro Andrade. Because he had two previous burglary convictions, Andrade was sentenced to 50 years to life for stealing $153.54 worth of videos from two Kmarts. (Among the titles he chose: Free Willy 2, Cinderella, and Little Women.)

In another noted case, Jerry Dewayne Williams was sentenced to 25 years to life for stealing a slice of pepperoni pizza. Though the sentence was later reduced to six years, many saw the case as proof that the law was misguided.

"This strikes many people as inherently unfair," says Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that advocates alternatives to imprisonment. "It's lumping together pizza thieves and serial rapists."

During the mid 1990s, at the tail end of a long crime wave, 23 states adopted three-strikes laws. But in most of those states, the statutes are rarely used and few prisoners...