What we'll find here is that like the common explanations of poverty causing crime, bad childhood, bad potty training, or whatever, there is no doubt a kernal of truth in some of this reasoning about the severity of Three Strikes making some people more violent or intensifying the hatred the already hateful culture acts on when committing a crime. But a kernal does not a whole stalk make.

Example: Relative poverty is not nice, no, but is a far cry from the true grinding penury some people and whole nations have with lower crime rates than ours. So while theft is the ostensible motivation for much crime, the culture around us no doubt has a much larger thuggish influence on behavior for some people, especially criminals, than responses to stringent laws.

Ultimately, the fault is the individual's cirminal thinking, and as Samuel Saminow showed criminality comes ultimately from criminal modes of thinking.