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Comment by burner556 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that the complicit DAs and recent lax attitudes towards crime are probably a root cause, but it's almost too easy to blame "woke" everything.

If everyone woke went away tomorrow, our society would still have many of these problems.

Personally? I think it's just the chickens coming home to roost on the degradation of our society since the 1970s and it's acceleration since the 2008 financial collapse, but it could also be a lack of investment (emotional, personal and financial) in local communities.

not degradation of society at large, it's typically the usual suspects.

I don't know who these "usual suspects" would be in this context. However, I do think our society has degraded and it's possible to measure in many ways - wages, access to education, healthcare outcomes, outlook for the future etc...

Or perhaps poverty and inequality are to blame? If people had a place in society and could afford basic things, why would they steal?

Maybe for the boosters that grab the items, but this isn't desperation theft, it's the rise of new, effective criminal enterprises. Why has shoplifting become a lucrative criminal business for the operators who pay the actual thieves?

Because they can easily move the goods online, which wasn't the case until recently.

Because it's fun, easy, and beats working.

Unless we arrest, prosecute, and imprison them. Or punish them other ways; how about flogging? It's arguably both a better deterrent and more humane than prison.

Saying "Sure, go ahead!" is better for no one.

The issue seems less the boosters who are paid to shoplift than the operators moving the goods online profitably enough to hire an army of thieves.

No, the issue is that we don't have the political will to arrest, prosecute, and imprison criminals, until our societies consist of people who don't commit crime.

Expand mass incarceration in the U.S., which has already eclipsed the scale of Black slavery, Nazi camps, and Soviet gulags, until everybody is imprisoned?

Why not hire competent investigators to infiltrate and bring down this new model of highly profitable criminal operation (pay boosters -> warehouse goods -> move product online)?

Instead all ya got is lOcK Up TeH BooSterS?

That’s a great idea. I think we should do that. As well as lock up the boosters. If you let people steal without repercussions society goes down fast

Agreed, the lack of fines or jail time in some localities does seem to be a critical piece of the business model.

Here in Maine, our max fine of $1000 and/or a jail sentence of up to 180 days for theft sounds about right, but in turn I'm supportive of efforts to lower the local incarceration rate: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/ME.html

That's what poor and backwards cultures do and we are far from that point. Would anyone sincerely trust the government with the authority to chop off a hand. From personal experience, it is really easy to frame someone for theft. There must be no mean streets in your past.

America has harsher prison sentencing than any country in the world: source, the per-capita prison rate of American citizens.

>Chop off a hand if convicted for theft. Actually enforce our laws.

That's... not a law anywhere in the US that I'm aware of.

Sounds like a Code of Hammurabi reference.

Make the Bronze Age Great Again.

Islamic Sharia.

It’s actually not an enforceable law anywhere in the US since that would be cruel and unusual punishment.

The goal is justice.

That form of justice is unacceptable.

It is definitely acceptable when the right conditions apply.

We don’t practice that kind of savagery in our society.

Justice is justice, and is required for a functioning society. We see where being overly lenient and not enforcing justice has caused us to end up.

There’s a whole spectrum between law enforcement and prosecutors doing the basics of their job as a deterrent and cutting off people’s hands.

Are we too lenient? Sure! Should we cut off hands? Hell no. This isn’t the Middle Ages.

It's only applied in certain specific situations. Again, justice is justice. "Middle ages" is non-conducive to the argument and just straw manning.

This isn’t an argument. This would have to be an argument for me to be straw manning, and if this were an argument that would not be a correct use of the phrase “straw manning” because the word you are looking for is “contempt”.

There is no room in our society for this form of savagery and it is both against our laws and at this point of time our customs. I can’t control what a man thinks to himself privately even if he should grow past it, but please do not advocate that Middle Ages era nonsense here.

We’re done here.

Dismissing something as "middle ages" with only emotional arguments such as "savagery" or "nonsense" isn't really making a point. If "customs" are causing societal decline, maybe we should rethink them.

Justice is justice.

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