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"Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end." -- Matt Taibbi, "Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws", Rolling Stone, issue dated 2013-04-11
The rest of the paragraph, if you want context: "As the years passed and word of great masses of nonviolent inmates serving insanely disproportionate terms began to spread in the legal community, it became clear that any attempt to repair the damage done by Three Strikes would be a painstaking, ungainly process at best. The fear of being tabbed "soft on crime" left politicians and prosecutors everywhere reluctant to lift their foot off the gas pedal for even a moment, and before long the Three Strikes punishment machine evolved into something that hurtled forward at light speed, but moved backward only with great effort, fractions of a millimeter at a time."
(no subject)
One may still decide that it's unjust for someone to be sent to prison for, say, shoplifting. But it would be more honest to report, e.g. "two-time convicted rapist sent to life in prison for shoplifting", or whatever.
Any conversation about reforming the Three Strikes laws has to start from getting honest about what problems they were trying to solve and what those cases really look like. Those problems are fundamentally that our system of jurisprudence, which addresses criminal infractions on a case-by-case basis, doesn't really handle people who are committed or incorrigible serial criminals very well.
ETA: "the standard has to be the same for everyone" is exactly wrong, and the problem in a nutshell: that decontextualizing crimes from the lives of the criminals who commit them works really, really poorly.