Ellen C. Caldwell | ECLAIRE.me

California is a trendsetter for criminal justice policy in the United States and incarcerates over 170,000 people in its prisons each year. The state’s initiative process, which allows citizens to vote directly on proposed changes to state law, has created policies that have expanded the state’s incarceration rates. California’s Three Strikes law, for example, was passed by California voters in 1994 and is the most punitive three strikes law in the country.

Initiatives such as Three Strikes gained popular support through media campaigns that relied upon images and rhetoric to demonize “criminals” and to obscure the actual content of the proposed legal reforms. Images play a powerful role in shaping popular culture and political beliefs. This article explores the impact of images on California voters’ perceptions of criminals, and the resulting support of “get tough on crime” propositions within the state. Specific imagery that permeated the public sphere through magazines, campaign commercials, and local news broadcasts are analyzed in the relation to the original Three Strikes initiative, a proposed amendment to the Three Strikes initiative, and a juvenile crime act in order to highlight the influence of images on popular culture and on pop culture’s subsequent influence on criminal justice policy in California.