The right three strikes.

• Author: Franklin, Daniel
• Position: Three strikes and out law

In October 1, 1993, Richard Allen Davis broke into the suburban Petaluma, California home where 12-year-old Polly Klaas was having a slumber party with two of her friends. While Polly's mother slept in the next room, Davis tied up the girls at knife point, and kidnapped Polly. After an agonizing two-month search that drew international attention, police found the girl's body in a ditch only 35 miles from her home. She had been strangled to death.

There was no explanation, no apparent motive. But what made the crime most frightening, what made this nightmare-come-to-life resonate so powerfully throughout the country, was that it seemed there was no longer anywhere to go to escape the violence. Predatory crime had moved to the suburbs.

When his daughter's body was found, Marc Klaas thanked the country for its concern and said he took comfort in the fact that Polly had become "America's child." Davis, then, became the man who killed America's child, and he had a profile worthy of the distinction. The 39-year-old had been arrested 17 times, including three times for kidnapping and sexual abuse. His history of violence stretched back to his adolescence, when he would set cats on fire for fun. "Because of the obvious threat to the community," his probation officer wrote in 1977 after an attempted kidnapping conviction, "it is believed there is no alternative but imprisonment." Less than five years later, Davis was paroled. But it took him only a year to be arrested again, this time for burglary and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. This was the pattern of his adult life. Of the 18 years prior to the Polly Klaas murder, Davis had spent 14 behind bars. On his release, it took him an average of less than five months to be rearrested. There could be no better symbol of the spread of violence in America and of the failure of the criminal justice system to stop it.

In response to the country's fear and desperation, politicians began touting "three strikes and you're out" as the solution to the problem of violence. The proposal had been floating around California for about a year, slowly gaining support, primarily among conservatives. But when proponents of the bill correctly claimed that "three strikes and you're out" would have prevented Polly Klaas' murder, the idea took wing across the country. In Washington state elections last November, for example, 76 percent of voters approved the state's version of "three strikes and you're out." On March 3, the California State Senate approved the bill 29 to 7 in the face of overwhelming public support. State Senator Newton Russel said at the time, "I don't think we have any choice."

It was a feeling many state legislators began to share. In the 11 months since Polly Klaas was abducted from her home, eight states added repeat offender laws and over 20 more are now considering such bills in their legislatures. The new federal crime bill includes "three strikes" as a central way, in the words of Vice President Gore, to put "a huge dent" in violent crime, despite projections that it will affect only 500 federal cases per year. In his State of the Union address, President Clinton also hyped "three strikes," saying it offered the country a way to be "tough and smart" about crime.

But unexpected problems are already cropping up in the states that have "three strikes" laws. Take the case of Steven Drake Gordon, who holds the dubious distinction of being the first person in Sacramento to be prosecuted under "three strikes and you're out." Addicted to drugs and homeless for the past nine years, Gordon had a...