One strike you're out

One strike, you're out is a colloquial term for a policy adhered to by public housing officials in the United States which requires tenants living in housing projects or otherwise receiving housing assistance from the federal government to be evicted if they, or any guest or visitor under their more or less direct control, engage in certain types of criminal activity on — or in some cases even off — the premises of said housing. This term is used because no second chance is given to many of the offending tenants. The term is apparently a back-formation of the "three strikes, you're out" concept embodied in the mandatory sentencing laws for repeat criminal offenders that began to be enacted in various American states in the 1990s.

Legislation mandating the eviction of tenants whose housing units are the scene of criminal actions was passed by the United States Congress in 1996 and signed by President Bill Clinton. The provisions of the law took effect gradually and were essentially fully in place nationwide by 1998. While many types of crime are covered by the law, the vast majority of the evictions pursued under it have involved acts of physical and sexual violence and the sale and/or possession of illicit drugs.

In theory, the offending tenant is banned for life from receiving any form of federal public housing assistance, but a mechanism does exist for the evictee to apply for reinstatement after three years (with no guarantee that this application, or for that matter any future such application, will be granted). Individual states are also permitted to opt out of the law, or to modify its provisions as they see fit, such as by imposing only a temporary rather than a lifetime ban, or limiting the ban to certain offenses.

The law has encountered fierce opposition from African-American groups, and advocates for the poor in general; in January, 2001, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared the one-strike-you're-out law to be unconstitutional in cases where the criminal wrongdoing in question was actually committed not by the tenant but by a person not legally residing in the unit, such as the tenant's grown child or guest ("Rucker v. Davis"). However, this ruling was overturned in 2002 by the United States Supreme Court.

Since the passage of the public-housing law that forms the basis for this article, the term "One strike, you're out" has also acquired other popular applications, including the idea that the Roman Catholic Church should defrock priests upon the first sustained allegation of child molestation, and also to denote a proposed law in Washington that would mandate a life prison sentence for anyone convicted of any of several sexually-motivated crimes against children; known as Initiative 861, it failed to gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in 2004.

See also

* Zero tolerance