From The Sentencing Project:
Introduction
“Habitual offender” laws, also known as “habitual criminal,” laws, are sentencing
laws that significantly increase the length of a sentence based on an individual’s
prior convictions.
They are widely understood to have emerged from the “tough-on-crime” movement in the 1980s and 1990s.1 During this time period, a number of states passed these
laws, often in the form of “Three Strikes and You’re Out” laws, which require judges to impose life sentences for third convictions for certain offenses. Washington state passed such a law in 1993, California amended a prior version of its law in 1994 adding a number of violent and non-violent crimes that would qualify for life sentences, and the federal government included a three strikes law in the 1994 Crime Bill.2 Despite these prominent examples of “habitual offender” laws enacted during this time period, the origination of these laws extends back much further.
“Habitual offender” laws first spread across the country in the early 1900s as part of the eugenics movement, which grew in the 1880s and reached its peak in the 1920s. The aim of the eugenics movement was to create a superior race in order to address social problems such as crime and disease, which the movement assumed had a biological basis.3 Applying pseudoscience, laws and policies were created to prevent those who were deemed inferior, such as the mentally ill, those convicted of criminal of defenses, or the physically frail, from reproducing. Eugenics and racism are deeply entwined, and the “projects” of eugenics supported “racial nationalism and racial purity.”4 One example of the relationship between race and
eugenics is found in Nazi Germany, where "Nazi plan planners appropriated and incorporated eugenics as they implemented racial policy and genocide.
Read the full report here.
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