David and Goliath

In June of 1992, Kimber Reynolds comes home from college to attend a wedding. Afterward, she goes with a friend to dinner at a restaurant called the Daily Planet in downtown Fresno, California. After eating, she’s about to get back in her car when Joe Davis and Douglas Walker approach on a motorcycle and hit Kimber with it, using it to pin her to the car. The motorcycle is stolen, and both men are meth addicts. Davis has just been paroled from prison, and Walker has been to jail seven times. Davis takes Kimber’s purse while Walker blocks her friend from coming to her rescue. Still pinning Kimber to the car, Davis takes out a gun and puts it to her head. When she flinches, he pulls the trigger before driving away with Walker. That night, Kimber’s father, Mike, receives a call and rushes to the hospital, but Kimber dies the following day.

Before Kimber dies, Mike holds her hand and promises to do everything he can to “prevent this from happening to anybody else.” He then goes on a popular radio show the very day of her death, spending two hours talking to the host about what happened and taking calls. Afterward, he goes home and assembles a meeting, inviting everyone he knows who might have some kind of influence in the community (including three judges, employees at the police department, and other people involved in the legal system). Addressing them, Reynolds talks about Fresno’s high crime rate and points out that Douglas Walker was first arrested as a 13-year-old and, on the night of Kimber’s murder, had been granted temporary release to visit his pregnant wife but then never returned to prison. Talking to the people gathered in his backyard, Reynolds asks how they can fix the broken legal system.

The conversation Mike Reynolds stages leads to the Three Strikes Law, which dictates that serious second-time offenders must serve double the amount of time in prison as their crimes would normally warrant. Third-time offenders, according to the law, go to jail for 25 years to life, even if their third crime isn’t serious. By collecting signatures and advocating for this law, Reynolds manages to convince the state of California to instate it. In the coming years, the crime rate in California drops considerably. To this day, Reynolds remains proud of this accomplishment. Despite this apparent success, though, Gladwell questions whether or not Reynolds truly got what he wanted by helping bring about the Three Strikes Law, ultimately suggesting that the effect of punishment on crime has diminishing returns. It is, Gladwell argues, an inverted-U curve. 

When Reynolds helps to institute the Three Strikes Law, he operates on the assumption that more severe forms of punishment will deter criminals from committing crimes. According to him, the punishment for breaking the law (before the Three Strikes Law went into effect) wasn’t great enough, which meant that criminals believed it was worth the risk to commit crimes. Gladwell agrees that a lack of punishment leads to more crime, but he doesn’t think this is always the case. Of course, people would commit more crimes in a society in which there no repercussions at all. However, it’s also the case that, at a certain point, having more penal practices doesn’t decrease crime. After all, many criminals do their best to not think about what might happen if they get caught, so increasing the severity of punishment doesn’t deter them.

One of Reynolds’s arguments for the Three Strikes Law is that putting criminals in prison and keeping them for at least 25 years removes them from society, thereby decreasing the overall crime rate. Gladwell disagrees with this, insisting that the relevant data doesn’t support this theory. The average criminal, he argues, simply does not continue to commit crimes into old age. Looking at graphs comparing arrests to an offender’s age, it becomes clear that middle-aged men generally don’t break many laws. Gladwell admits that giving young criminals longer sentences does make sense, but that once a criminal becomes middle-aged, the government is no longer protecting society from people who are statistically likely to be of any danger. In turn, the Three Strikes Law unnecessarily crowds prisons, which is a waste of government spending.

Having established that more punishment doesn’t always decrease crime, Gladwell asks a more important question: is there a point at which increased punishments begin to have detrimental effects on the crime rate? According to some criminologists, the answer is yes. One argument is that putting a person in prison indirectly effects crime by impacting the lives of that person’s loved ones, making it more likely that children will grow up to become criminals themselves. In keeping with this, children are up to 400 percent more likely to break the law if they have an incarcerated parent. Worse, people who return to their communities after spending time in prison are often psychologically “damaged” by their experiences as inmates, and coming back home can put yet another strain on their children. In this sense, there can be adverse effects if too many people go to prison and spend too much time there.

A more statistically precise way of stating the adverse effects of sending so many people to prison is that “if more than two percent of [a] neighborhood goes to prison, the effect on crime starts to reverse.” Although Mike Reynolds believes that the Three Strikes Law ended up saving lives by decreasing California’s overall crime rate, the reality is that the rate began its descent before the law even went into effect. What’s more, the crime rate also decreased in states that didn’t adopt the Three Strikes Law. At the same time, criminologists are divided about the efficacy of the law, since various studies have come up with contradictory answers. Regardless, the state of California made large changes to the law in 2012, significantly walking back its original power. 

Turning his attention to another heartbreaking story about murder, Gladwell introduces Wilma Derksen, a woman living in Winnipeg, Manitoba with her family in the 1980s. One night, Wilma’s 13-year-old daughter Candace calls and asks for a ride home. Overwhelmed by the prospect of finishing housework, loading her younger children into the car, picking up Candace, and then going to get her husband from work, Wilma tells Candace to take the bus. Several hours later, she realizes Candace should be home already. Panicked, she picks up her husband, and together they search for their daughter, but they never find her. Seven weeks later, the police find Candace’s body in a shed not far from the Derksens’ house. Her hands and feet have been tied up, and she has frozen to death.  

The Derksens’ friends and family visit them the day they learn that Candace has died. Late that night, a man appears at the door. He tells Wilma and her husband that somebody murdered his child, too. He sits at their kitchen table and tells them the story of how his daughter’s murderer was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison. For years now, the man has been trying to bring him to justice. He tells the Derksens how terrible it is, and they can sense that his anger has ruined his entire life. When he leaves, then, they decide to see his visit not as a glimpse at their own future, but as a warning about what their lives could become. The next day, they tell reporters that they hope to find Candace’s killer so they can share “a love that seems to be missing in” the person’s life.

Gladwell highlights the difference between the Derksens’ and Mike Reynolds’s reactions to tragedy. While Mike Reynolds believed he could wield power to make things right, the Derksens didn’t invest themselves in “the power of giants.” This is perhaps partially because they were raised in the Mennonite religion and taught that people should strive toward forgiveness, even in moments of great hardship. But there’s also another reason the Derksens decided to forgive their daughter’s killer—they intuitively grasped the concept of the inverted-U curve, understanding that changing the laws wouldn’t necessarily do anything to bring about a greater sense of good, nor would it make them feel any better about what happened to Candace. 

In 2007—decades after Candace’s murder—the police catch her killer. He has a criminal history full of sexual abuse offenses and has been jailed multiple times. During his trial, Wilma Derksen struggles to be in the same room as him. As she sits there, she realizes that the fact that he tied Candace means he most likely tortured her for his own sexual pleasure. This rattles Wilma to her core, testing her ability to forgive the man. However, she eventually finds it within herself to do so because she recognizes that it would be toxic to hold onto her anger. She knows she would have lost her husband and everything she cares about if she had held onto her fury for the past 20 years. Accordingly, she once again finds a way to let go of her feelings of spite and anger, saving her life once more.