“And it’s Three Strikes You’re Out at the Old… Election… Game!”

Post #266

1100 words; 5 minutes to read

By Tyler King, doctoral candidate, and Anthony Doob, Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto.  We appreciate the collaboration with the Centre on this and other posts.

Summary: Anti-crime policies such as ‘three strikes’ and mandatory minimums have been shown to be both ineffective and expensive.

We all know Mark Carney loves hockey. On 28 April the Liberal leader led his party to victory in Canada’s 2025 federal election, just months after it seemed like they were down 3-0 in the Stanley Cup finals; in January the Liberals were polling 24 points behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. But the race tightened drastically by the April campaign, the same time we saw Carney in TV ads dawning a Team Canada hockey jersey and rubbing shoulders at the rink – always “elbows up” – with Canadian comedian Mike Myers. (And in a testament to his promise to unite Canada, Carney is an Edmonton Oilers fan, while Mike Myers is a die-hard Toronto Maple Leafs fan).

Although we all know about Carney’s economic resumé, as much as his ability to appeal to fans of “Canada’s Game”, what people might not realize is he seems to also know a bit about America’s favourite pastime: baseball.

After Poilievre promised to institute a “three strikes” law, where, on the “third strike” (the third conviction of certain criminal acts) a very harsh mandatory penalty is imposed, Carney told reporters in Calgary that, when reforming the justice system, he wouldn’t “jump to a baseball rule of three strikes and you’re out”.

Evidence is better than slogans

Much like Team Canada narrowly defeating Team USA to win the NHL’s Four Nations Face-Off in February, we feel that, at least in this context, criminal justice policy also escaped certain disaster with Carney’s victory. It would seem – or at least we can hope – that Prime Minister Carney would prefer to focus criminal justice reform on evidence and principles rather than silly slogans like “three strikes and you’re out.”

Throughout the campaign we’ve tried to understand why Poilievre seems so attached to mandatory minimum penalties when the evidence is overwhelming that they don’t reduce crime. Then one of us remembered something from an introductory psychology course we took decades ago. Baby geese (and some other animals) “imprint” (or become psychologically attached to) certain objects – typically other members of their own species – when they are exposed to them early in life. But experiments have shown that they sometimes imprint on other species, the most famous example being the baby geese who imprinted on the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz in the 1930s.

It occurred to us that this may have happened to Poilievre early in his professional life as an MP. He became an MP in 2004. And soon afterwards (22 November 2005), when he was still the parliamentary equivalent of a baby (or perhaps an adolescent) goose, a prosecutor from Florida appeared in a Canadian House of Commons committee hearing explaining how Florida had reduced gun crime considerably with a law that required mandatory minimums of between 10 years and life in prison for someone who used a firearm during an offence. This prosecutor believed that a substantial reason for the drop in violent crime that Florida had experienced in the 5 years after the law came into effect was due to this set of mandatory minimum penalties.

The minutes of the House of Commons meeting don’t indicate that Poilievre was in the room when the Florida prosecutor appeared, but it does seem he may have been imprinted – for life? – on the idea that mandatory minimums made good policy.

Evidence does not support the idea

Even though Poilievre never provided a shred of evidence – then or during the most recent election campaign – showing that policies like three strikes would actually reduce crime, other conservative commenters have taken up the Florida prosecutor’s torch.

At the time the US prosecutor was trying to persuade Canadians that 3-strikes was a good policy, there certainly was a decrease in violent crime in Florida. The violent crime rate dropped 142 violent crimes per 100K residents in the 5 years after the law came into effect. That might sound good unless you happened to notice something that three-strikes advocates cleverly ignored: the size of the drop in the 5 years before the law came into effect was considerably larger – 293 violent crimes per 100K residents.  In other words, there was, at that time, a trend downwards. The drop had nothing to do with 3-strikes.

Similarly, between 1993 and 1996, 25 U.S. states passed various versions of the three strikes law. One study examined crime in 188 large cities where these laws came into effect, and the data showed much of the same: crime was just as likely to go up as it was to go down after three-strikes policies were implemented. In fact, homicide rates increased by about 10.4% after these policies were implemented – a finding that, like the decreases, almost certainly had little to do with three-strikes policies (https://irp.cdn-website.com/63cb20a6/files/uploaded/CrimHighlightsV7N3.pdf).

Retribution?

It may be that the remnants of the Conservative party who were elected still want to lean on the moral argument that, regardless of the lack of a deterrent effect, they are justified on retributive grounds to impose mandatory harsh sentences. The problem with these approaches is that often the wrong person is being given the harsh sentence. The young “drug courier” whose is paid a small amount to deliver drugs for a major drug dealer is more likely to be caught than the real dealer, but a long sentence of imprisonment is not going to touch the drug problem. In a real example from California, stealing a drill from a garage led to a 25 year to life sentence for a man with two prior household burglaries, one of which was in the late 1970s (https://irp.cdn-website.com/63cb20a6/files/uploaded/CrimHighlightsV1N2.pdf).

Like instant replay in baseball, we think it’s good thing that our umpires (i.e. judges and lawmakers) have the responsibility to impose defensible outcomes on those who offend.

The Liberals under Mark Carney have a lot on their plate right now, including trying to address the real problems in our criminal justice system.  We hope that the Prime Minister and his various Ministers will move beyond slogans and realize that what people often talk about as “criminal justice reform” is really two separate problems. Addressing criminal justice problems (sentencing, bail, imprisonment, etc.) is just one of them. Quite separate from that, we hope that this government would address – in a serious and evidence-based fashion – the problem of crime. We all want to reduce the harm that comes to Canadians who are victims of crime.  And we all want to use resources effectively to reduce crime and make Canada a safer place to live.

But we will only be successful at that if we realize that the main causes of crime are much broader than problems that can be addressed with baseball-bat-thinking.

About this blog: The John Howard Canada blog is intended to support greater public understanding of criminal justice issues.  Blog content does not necessarily represent the views of the John Howard Society of Canada.  All blog material may be reproduced freely for any non-profit purpose as long as the source is acknowledged.  We welcome comments (moderated). Contact: blogeditor@johnhoward.ca.