"Twenty years ago, amid a national panic over crime, California voters adopted the country’s most stringent three-strikes law, sentencing repeat felons to 25 years to life, even if the third offense was a minor theft.
The law epitomized the tough-on-crime policies that produced overflowing prisons and soaring costs.
Now California voters appear poised to scale back the heavy reliance on incarceration they once embraced, with a measure
that would transform several lower-level, nonviolent felonies into
misdemeanors punishable by brief jail stays, if that, rather than time
in a state penitentiary. The referendum on Nov. 4 is part of a national
reappraisal of mass incarceration."
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