It's not often that one sees genuine angst among politicians, but the Capitol was infused with near-panic in the early weeks of 1994. Or more accurately, Democratic legislators were.

It was an election year, one in which Gov. Pete Wilson and other Republicans were planning to make crime a major focus of their campaigns. Democrats' high anxiety reflected those political circumstances, certainly, but the major cause was something called "three strikes and you're out."

During the 1993 legislative session, Democrats had stalled a measure that would have imposed much-tougher sentences - up to life in prison - on felons who committed multiple crimes, and its chief sponsor, Fresno photographer Mike Reynolds, whose daughter had been murdered, was working on an initiative measure for the 1994 ballot.

The "three-strikes" movement was receiving critical financial support from the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association. But as the Legislature reconvened in 1994, the compelling political heat was coming from the sensational Polly Klaas case. The 12-year-old girl had been abducted from her Petaluma home in late 1993 and brutally slain by a sex criminal who had recently been released from prison.

The crime and the ensuing media frenzy generated demands for a crackdown on repeat felons that was made to order for Reynolds' "three-strikes" drive. "People are frightened; people are real frightened," said the legendary speaker of the state Assembly, Willie Brown.

Brown spoke as his fellow Democrats, fearful of being branded soft on crime, clamored to revive the "three-strikes" legislation and enact it into law. "You're talking about a group of people of zero courage," Brown said at one point. "Not even Willie Brown, regardless of his persuasive powers, could turn that around or alter that course. I would be shouting in the wind."

Within hours of Brown's remarks, the measure was passed and placed on Wilson's desk. He signed it exactly 10 years ago today. Reynolds went ahead with the initiative, and voters ratified it by a large margin later in the year.

As "three strikes" was being debated in political circles, there were widely divergent predictions on what effect it would have. While Reynolds and other advocates argued that it would reduce crime by making felons fearful of committing multiple offenses, critics said it would pack the prisons with inmates whose "third-strike" crimes were relatively petty. And the debate has not lessened after 10 years.

Reynolds and his organization say that the law has lowered California's crime index. They say that 2 million fewer major felonies were committed in the 10 years since the law's enactment than in the prior decade, including nearly 7,000 fewer homicides. "It has had a huge impact on crime, and the biggest benefits have been on minorities," Reynolds said Thursday - reacting to contentions of critics that the law has exacerbated the disproportionate incarceration of nonwhite Californians.

Reynolds also notes that the 1994 predictions that the prison population would soar beyond 200,000 and that courts would be clogged with "three-strikes" trials have proved false. Although the prison population did not reach the level widely predicted in 1994, it did jump by nearly 25 percent during the period to more than 150,000.

But the liberal Justice Policy Institute, in its own review of the law titled "Still Striking Out," says it's been a failure, contending that New York, which doesn't have a "three-strikes" law, has enjoyed a steeper crime decline and that the inmates serving enhanced sentences for second-and third-strike crimes are overwhelmingly African Americans and Latinos. "With California facing a $15 billion budget gap this year, and with little evidence that 'three strikes' is providing the kind of crime control impact its backers had hoped, California policymakers should seriously consider ending their 10-year experiment with the nation's most costly and punitive 'three strikes' law," Vince Schiraldi, executive director of the institute, says in a statement accompanying the review.

Ideologically, a liberal Legislature probably would agree with Schiraldi. Politically, however, it's a dead issue.