Three-strikes law
law providing more severe penalties for repeat offenders
In the United States, habitual offender laws—commonly referred to as three-strikes laws—require a person who is convicted of an offense and who has one or two other previous serious convictions to serve a mandatory life sentence in prison, with or without parole depending on the jurisdiction. The purpose of the laws is to increase the punishment of those who continue to commit offenses after being convicted of one or two serious crimes. They are part of the United States Justice Department's Anti-Violence Strategy.
Twenty-eight states have some form of a "three-strikes" law. A person accused under such laws is referred to in a few states (notably Connecticut and Kansas) as a "persistent offender", while Missouri uses the unique term "prior and persistent offender". In most jurisdictions, only crimes at the felony level qualify as serious offenses, with some jurisdictions further restricting qualifying offenses to only include violent felonies.
The three-strikes law significantly increases the prison sentences of persons convicted of a felony who have been previously convicted of two or more violent crimes or serious felonies, and limits the ability of these offenders to receive a punishment other than a life sentence.
The expression "Three strikes and you are out" is derived from baseball, where a batter has three chances to either hit a pitched ball or earn an error called a "strike." After three "strikes" the batter strikes out and their chance to score is over.
The U.S. is not the only country to have this law. New Zealand has also enacted a form of the law.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Three-strikes law” as law providing more severe penalties for repeat offenders. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as law providing more severe penalties for repeat offenders. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1637292. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Three-strikes law” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.