In one sense it is poetic logic—if not poetic justice—that the perception of a nearly ubiquitous condition of peril has produced support for a nearly ubiquitous policing and surveillance apparatus. But the logic of the lockdown may produce even more troubling parallels than a self-imposed and self-protective restriction of movement that corresponds to the punitive imprisonment of violent offenders. Three strikes is premised on the rejection of the ideology of correction—a marked shift in the ideology of imprisonment that possibly signals a break as profound as that from punitive to corrective punishment. As Foucault asserts, the discourse of criminology provided a scientific basis for the rationale for imprisonment: "the alibi. . . that if one imposes a penalty on somebody it is not to punish what he has done but to transform what he is."²¹ But it was all too quickly discovered that prisons, far from reforming criminals, 

serve only to manufacture new criminals and to drive existing criminals deeper into criminality.... Prison professionalized people. Instead of having nomadic bands of robbers . . . as in the eighteenth century, one [now has] this closed milieu of delinquency, thoroughly structured by the police, an essentially urban milieu and one whose political and economic value was far from negligible.²² 

This would be troubling enough even if these methods could be expected to reduce the level of violence in society. But just as the use of prison for reform purposes was a failure, instead producing ever more crime, the segregation or isolation of populations in carceral structures is likely to produce increasing levels of violence and fear. The restriction of individual movement and the isolation of the ghetto and the prison impedes socialization, inhibits sociability, and thus breeds antisocial behavior. Although the early sociology of the ghetto proposed that antisocial behavior among the inner-city poor was a function of retrograde cultural norms, a "culture of poverty," this view has been revisited and revised²⁴ with an eye toward the effects of structural geographic segregation and isolation themselves. Rather than a causal link between culture and antisocial behavior, contemporary observers have found a more plausible link between social isolation and dysfunctional socialization. 

What then might be the consequences of the nominally self-imposed isolation of a large and growing segment of the American upper and middle classes? One can expect an increasingly fragmented and isolated populus to develop a variety of subcultural norms that will prove dysfunctional outside the confines of a homogeneous workplace–bedroom community–shopping/recreation center nexus. These populations can be expected to grow more fearful of an underclass they know only through their media-orchestrated nightmares. Worse yet, the perverse forms of socialization that a surveillance society produces may be dysfunctional even within the social sphere that creates them. To paraphrase James Baldwin: In the face of one's prisoner, one sees oneself. Walk the halls of the prison or the streets of the ghetto and see what we, this nation, have become.²⁵  

Three strikes claims to protect society from the born criminal, to draw a sharp boundary between the innocent who deserve freedom from the menace of crime and the guilty who deserve lifelong isolation. But these laws will not reduce the bulk of the crime that actually affects its supporters, and it will leave unaffected the media theater of crime and deviance, a series of spectacles largely autonomous of the material phenomena of social transgression. Three strikes generates not a solution to the problem or the perception of crime, but rather the rationale for its continued existence and the expansion of its corrosive social logic. Because the boundary between criminal and law abiding, deviant and normal, is inherently unstable and by nature manipulable, the oppressive consequences of three strikes and the ideology it represents will not be limited to "criminal personalities"—or indeed to any stable or defined class. The category "deviant" travels well but never rests long, visiting the discursive fields of race and class, the terrain of inner city and suburb, the scientific space of genetics and eugenics. Almost as oppressive as its effect on the individuals it will jail for life is the effect of three strikes on the society as a whole. Three strikes evokes the direct inversion of Thomas Jefferson's famous dictum: a social milieu in which the price of constant vigilance is freedom.
Richard T. Ford