Gladwell starts off the chapter with the story of Mike Reynolds and his daughter Kimber. Kimber grew up in Fresno, California and was a student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. One weekend in June of 1992, Kimber came home from collage to go to a wedding. After the wedding she decided to have dinner with an old friend of hers, Greg Calderon. The two ate at the Daily Planet restaurant, in Fresno’s Tower District. As Kimber and Greg both headed back to her car two men named Walkers and Davis pulled up alongside the car and trapped both Kimber and Greg. Davis grabbed Kimber’s purse and shot her in the head. Later that night Kimber died while holding her dad's hand. Mike Reynolds’s promised his daughter that he was going to do everything in his power to prevent something like this from happening to anyone else. That week, he held meetings in his backyard full of people he believed would make a difference. The group agreed that the penalties associated with breaking the law were too low, leading to the creation of the three strike law. The three strikes law dropped crime by 36.6 percent after it was passed. Gladwell raises the question if the three strikes law did more harm than good. He takes us back to the inverted U-Curve. He explains how over time the punishment for crimes stop having any effect on criminals. The three strikes law was found to have no effect after a certain time and was scaled back.

The second story Gladwell writes is about Wilma Dirksen. Dirksen had lost her daughter in a very similar situation. On a Friday afternoon in November, Dirksen received a call from her daughter Candace. She told her daughter to take the bus home from school and went on about her day. She soon realized something was wrong, Candace hadn’t arrived home. The Dirksen’s informed police and put up posters all over the town for missing Candace. About a month later they found out their daughter was abducted and tortured in a shed not far from their home. A strange man showed up at the Dirksen’s home and told them about his story of how his daughter was killed. Wilma didn’t respond as Reynolds did. She was warned of the consequences she might face if she allowed her daughter’s death to mentally eat her alive. In the end Wilma decided to forgive the man that killed her daughter. “A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds strength to forgive-- and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.”