David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

lower crime. Others said that it worked
but that the money spent on locking
criminals up would have been better
spent elsewhere. One recent study says
that Three Strikes brought down the
overall level of crime but,
paradoxically, increased the number of
violent crimes. Perhaps the largest group
of studies can find no effect at all, and
there is even a set of studies that argue
that Three Strikes raised crime rates.^5
The state of California conducted the
greatest penal experiment in American
history, and after twenty years and tens
of billions of dollars, nobody could
ascertain whether that experiment did
any good.^6 In November of 2012,