Opinion: Polly Klaas' murder accelerated the tough-on-crime movement. Her sisters want to stop it (via latimesopinion)
Jess Nichol has built a successful career as a leadership consultant, cultivating her skills as a public speaker while keeping her professional life separate from a childhood trauma that shaped her — and that also shifted the direction of the American criminal justice system.
Now, with homicides and other violent crimes up sharply, and with key county and state elections looming in California, the debate over the purpose and practices of the criminal justice system is intensifying. And it includes this question: What is the role of the victim in the criminal justice system?
“Over the last 26 years,” they wrote, “three-strikes laws have significantly contributed to mass incarceration in the United States and have exacerbated the systemic racism inherent in our justice system. Now, they are recording leading voices in criminal justice reform and people whose lives were affected by crime and punishment. And in April, I started a series of conversations with them about their efforts to promote a more rehabilitative and less gratuitously punitive criminal justice system.Polly Klaas’ story has been the subject of countless books, articles and TV documentaries presented as part of the “true crime” genre.
Every murder, every kidnapping, is shocking. But this one has the elements of a horror movie: a young girl, a slumber party, a fearsome stranger in the house, a knife, an abduction. The kidnapping became a fixture in the daily news for two awful months, until Dec. 4, when“I remember my dad pulled us in a circle,” Jess said. “And there were, I don’t know, eight to 10 people there. He told us. And we had to leave that house as soon as possible” — because reporters and cameras were about to arrive.
Jess recalled being excited about the three-strikes law, which was adopted first by the Legislature and then by the voters in 1994 in a kind of tough-on-crime competition. She was told the measure would prevent the same kind of thing happening to other kids.
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