Hi, Crime Drunkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And if you missed it, we did a

big announcement in the feed the other day. Brit is out for a while due to a

pretty serious brain surgery. She is doing well. She's out of surgery. She's

recovering, but she's going to be out for a while. And you can get all the

details in that message that we dropped in the feed, but at least for this week

we're taking this week off. But I didn't want to leave you hanging. We are

going to give you a precedent episode. And you are still going to hear Brit's

voice for a little while through the end of May. We got pre-recorded on some

episodes that are being edited now. So you will get to continue to hear her

voice for a while. But we just needed the week to kind of catch our breath. I've

spent a lot of time in South Bend with Brit and just get our bearings. This was it

was a week you guys. So let me tell you about another precedent setting case.

Here's a previously recorded episode of precedent. After two decades of

increasing crime rates, violence hit its peak in the US in the early 1990s. You

couldn't open a newspaper or turn on the evening news without hearing about a

murder and assault, a robbery, and people weren't just scared. They were angry, too.

If locking up habitual criminals wasn't going to do it, maybe it was time to

throw away the key. Today more than half of the US states have what's called a

three strikes law. Meaning if you've got two felony convictions under your belt,

the third is going to get you an automatic life sentence. Three strikes and

you're out. But that wasn't always the case. Before there was a three strikes

law, there was poly class. This is her story.

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