someone to not want to face that again." In other words, traditional notions of how punishment would deter, rehabilitate and/or alter behavior. This is based on the perspective of law-abiding people who look at punishment in terms of how such measures would affect them. In developing the Three Strikes Law, however, the question was how do such measures affect the criminal from his or her perspective? It was looked at it in terms of how would the group at whom the laws were aimed - lawbreakers - view punishment and how would it affect their behavior? It was not looked at it from the perspective of attempting to affect those who followed the law.

In order for criminal sentencing laws to be effective in reducing crime they must direct themselves to measures which affect lawbreakers. Here the objective was to enforce a policy determination regarding career criminals. The reality is that criminal sentencing laws generally are only used after they have failed in their traditional purpose of deterring crime. Simply put, you wouldn't be sentencing if you had deterred the offender from committing the crime in the first place.

The generally accepted notion is that the existence of punishment deters crime either through deterring people from committing a crime because of the existence of punishment or in altering behavior as a result of punishment which results in the punished person not committing more crimes. For purposes of formulation of the concept of the Three Strikes Law it was not accepted that simply the existence of punishment in its traditional sense was very effective in deterring serious and violent criminal behavior. Furthermore, it was not accepted that lengthening sentences was an effective deterrent generally to the commission of crime. And it was also not accepted that lengthening incarceration was reasonably effective in terms of rehabilitation in the traditional sense. I say the traditional sense because I am referring to punishment as a tool for altering behavior.

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