Inside the Three Strikes Project— An Inmate's Letter
by Matt Taibbi
RollingStone 

I had to leave a thing or two out of our new article in Rolling Stone on California's insane mandatory sentencing laws, "Cruel and Unusual Punishment— The Shame of The Three Strikes Laws."

The piece was based largely on interviews I did with Three Strikes prisoners as well as students, professors and other members of Stanford University's Three Strikes Project, which was instrumental in passing a 2012 ballot initiative fixing some of the worst aspects of the notorious law. I went out to the Palo Alto area and spent a fair amount of time with the Stanford crew, and also talked a good deal with prisoners, largely by phone, often at odd hours. And it was a strangely emotional experience...

Many are homeless and mentally ill, doing life for piddling nonviolent property crimes, the kind of people who are sympathetic because they may not be wholly responsible for their actions – they're either not capable of functioning without help, or damaged by gruesome childhood abuse, or schizophrenic, or all three things and more...

These are people like Shane Taylor, doing life for allegedly possessing a few grains of alleged meth, or Larry Williams, who got the max for buying a stolen cell phone, or a third, recently-released inmate (whose name is being withheld because he wants to get on with his life) – who got busted for trying to shoplift $28 of plumbing supplies from Home Depot by hiding them in a bag under some bricks that he'd actually paid for...