While some use has been made of the agenda setting portions of Kingdon's model, little attention has been paid to implications of the full model for policy change. At the same time, attention is being focused on three strikes legislation as a radical departure from past crime control efforts. Kingdon views policymaking as a process of several stages, e.g., problem definition, agenda setting, alternative generation, policy adoption, and implementation. He indicates items reach the government's agenda through three possible influence streams: problematic situations, specialized policy knowledge, and political events. Kingdon argues that these streams operate quite independently of one another and that agenda and policy change when streams are joined in an opportunity called a policy window. Policy windows are not rigidly scheduled; rather, they are mainly influenced by events in the problems and politics streams. The streams and windows approach is applied to analyze punishment, sentencing, and three strikes legislation. The authors show the three strikes provision of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act is really only an incremental addition to previous legislation, the 1984 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. They also demonstrate how Kingdon's model explains the process of policy change by identifying relevant actors, institutions, and political processes. 59 references