In addition, one would need to know what the prosecutorial policy was in the particular county prior to the advent of the law. In other words, were only a small percentage of cases that would now be eligible for Three Strikes going to trial or prosecuted vigorously prior to the enactment of the law? If a county had a low percentage of vigorous prosecution of such cases prior to the law, it would necessarily have a higher percentage of enforcement after the law. If anything, this would call into question the policy decision being made on this type of criminal prior to the advent of Three Strikes. Thus, increases in trial percentages of Three Strikes type cases pre and post passage of the law would depend on the trial rates of such cases prior to the law.

Even today, jurisdictions that have lower percentages of enforcement of Three Strikes cases and reap significant crime reductions must be evaluated in terms of what their enforcement rates were of such cases prior to Three Strikes. In other words, it is reasonable to conclude that their enforcement rate is having an affirmative impact that exceeds the impact of previous lower levels of enforcement. Likewise, where counties have high levels of enforcement, one must look at their previous levels of enforcement of similar types of cases. These statistical conclusions must also consider how many cases have pled because priors have been stricken?

One cannot reasonably assume a statistical conclusion about the impact of different levels of enforcement rates without analyzing what the enforcement rates were before because this would fail to consider the overlap between previous rates and current rates. Another way of looking at this would be to recognize that a county that had only a 10% enforcement rate pre Three Strikes and now has a 40% enforcement rate would only show a 40% enforcement rate but would actually have increased its enforcement rate of such cases by 300%. A county which had a 50% enforcement rate pre Three Strikes and now has a 75% enforcement rate would have only increased its enforcement rate by 50%.

Therefore, crime statistics that link crime reduction results to enforcement rates and attempt to draw a correlation between crime rates in low and high enforcement

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