If so, then yes, let's lock them up. "Everyone steals" is not a good defense to stealing.
I'm not defending stealing, I'm saying for all crime in America, the deterrent of jail doesn't appear to be working. That button has already been pressed, hard.
Deterrent ? It does work, the people in jail are not stealing
Because that's the whole point, isn't it? Prevent economic loss. So that means the solution needs to cost LESS then the problem. Jails cost more. This is exactly the opposite of working, even on purely economic terms.
It would literally be cheaper (and obviously far more efficient for the economy) to offer anyone who steals $50 000 per year as long as they don't steal again. I mean you'd be paying criminals more than police officers, so I get that there would be revolution, but perhaps there are a LOT of cheap possibilities. If you offer someone $10k and what you ask in return keeps them out of prison for 3 months, that's a LARGE profit for the economy ...
The "prevent economic loss, by preventing stealing" argument is pretty strongly against prisons, doubly so in California.
We might also look at things like how you can come back from jail and get a normal life, and looking into how we house people who are not suitable to get out again.
In the meantime, imprison the people who do commit crimes, and if they do so again after they're out, imprison them again.
There's a reason prisons are called "schools for crime", and it's because of silly lines like "if they do so again [...], imprison them again". Please actually think, and eventually realize that reducing recidivism rates is how you get your "people who come out don't commit more crimes".
> Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world; in 2016, only 20% of inmates re-offended within 5 years. [...] Norway's prisons are renowned for being some of the best and most humane in the world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_Norway
Treat people like people, it's that simple. Attitudes like ahh's arise from not expanding past using their lizard brain. They create more of the problem they purport to complain about. Straight contradiction.
In either case: send people who commit crime to those prisons. If they do it again, send them back.
The proof is in the pudding, and your pudding is rotten. Give it some actual thought.
Treat addiction like an illness, not a crime, and your numbers will fall in line with the rest of the countries, quickly. Moreso if you get rid of those for-profit prison system while you are at it.
Ok, so maybe addressing that will be more fruitful than baying for more punishment!
I agree that harsher punishments would not work, but compassion that simply enables this behavior isn’t the way either.
Honestly, the way the suburbs (like Bellevue WA) handle the problem via simple police intimidation (every incident is met with overwhelming police presence) to push the problems on more open nearby cities (Seattle in this case) seems to be the only that works (locally at least, it doesn’t solve the problem at all regionally or nationally).
Getting arrested permanently changed my view on our justice system. It was a nonviolent offense, related to a paperwork issue, but it resulted in a bench warrant being issued for me.
If I hadn’t just received several thousand dollars in my account from an unexpected windfall, I would not have been able to pay the jail fees. Not fines for the ticket - which was completely dropped - the jail fees for simply being arrested.
The total out the door cost to get arrested was north of $2100 for me. You can beat the case, but you can’t beat the ride.
Full stop there. No other explanation really needed.
The argument is that they are in law (so not illegal) and compensatory rather than punitive (so not punishment.)
This is contentious, though, and jails have sometimes lost legal cases around them, e.g.:
https://spectrumnews1.com/ky/louisville/news/2021/11/03/ruli...
The main reason for them, of course, is that while mass incarceration policies are popular with those bit subjected to them, paying for mass incarceration is not.
Is that true?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/17/walmart-shop...
I disagree, I do think people are going to jail for this.
There is evidence to support this thesis. First, we do know that a small group of people commit most of the crimes. Second, we see that in the U.S. when we let people out of institutions the crime rate went up until mass incarceration removed a roughly equivalent amount of people from society.
So there are about 2 million people who commit a huge number of crimes, and we need to decide, as a society, whether to lock these people up or live with the higher crime rates. I don't think there is much evidence that criminals can actually be treated somehow to be reformed, they are either tolerated* or warehoused until they age out.
(*) One middle ground of toleration you see in developing countries is creating zones where crimes can be committed more freely and rich people can buy their own security or live in zones where crimes are punished. Then criminals learn to avoid those zones. That's what a lot of nations (such as Argentina) do which have a large criminal class (like the U.S.) but that can't afford the costs of mass incarceration. They create geographic bubbles in which crime is low.
This is already happening in the USA. Bellevue WA has a much lower crime rate than Seattle WA. It isn't the rich people "buying" their own security, however, rather than them demanding their police are more numerous and tougher on crime than the city across the lake (pushing the problem over there). Even if King County (where Seattle and Bellevue are) doesn't prosecute, the people doing these things get annoyed with constant police interaction and harassment and so find Seattle much more appealing.
The top five cities for organized retail crime, in order, were Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, New York and San Francisco.
By “the DA” you are probably referring to the DA of the #5 city?
I feel like no one advocates for a middle ground. I usually don’t believe in locking people up excessively. I also don’t believe in effectively legalizing crime by never persecuting petty theft.
If it’s your second or third time shoplifting in bulk, I think a 6 month prison sentence is appropriate. There needs to be some penalty to disincentivize such behavior.
So, they make it more likely that you will become/remain a criminal once you come out, even after a short time. So, the middle ground doesn't really work well; we either have to try hard to not put someone in prison, or we basically commit to putting them in prison forever. Because we cannot really say the latter part out loud we release them occasionally and then put them back. The argument currently appears to be between these two extremes in isolation, and the real middle ground IMHO would be to do both things, to different people. But moderate punishment might be the worst of both worlds.
On other hand whole being marked felon thing is what really destroys the future. If you can't get a decent job, what options do you have left?
It'd appear though that given probability, an American is more likely to be in jail than the citizen of any other country, but even with this high threat of jail, these crimes seem to be on the rise.
It can be true that we over jail and impose longer sentences in some places, in some past eras, and/or for some crimes, to no good effect, while also in other places, other times, or for certain crimes, under punish such that there is zero deterrent effect when there needs to be at least some.
1. Americans are just more likely to be criminals.
2. Other nations may be equally or even more ineffective at tackling crime.
The assumption that jail doesn't work rests on the assumption that other nations track crime as effectively and that their people are equally criminal.
There just isn’t the capacity of the system to deal with how terrible so many people are and the end result of that is cops not bothering to even record instances as they don’t think it will matter.
This is Canada.
3. The American system is putting a lot of innocent people behind bars.
What demographics in the US do you think are least likely to be secure in food, housing, and healthcare?
For example, men dominate the prison and violent crime demographics compared to women.
The real solutions will be technical. More precise delivery tracking (so you know when your package will arrive, so it doesn't get stolen off your porch an hour later). Drone delivery. Package lockers. Man traps at the supermarket exits.
Harsher than “no punishment” might
If the two are unrelated, then it may be that people want harsher punishments anyway just as you don't want harsher punishments anyway.
What? No.
I think corporal punishment should be considered as an alternative. Hard to be a cool gangster when you have a sore ass.