Do you honestly think shoplifters should be locked in a cage?
So maybe take a step back, or five, and think about the causes of petty crimes and why they happen here more than other nations.
Reasonableness can be debated. That these crimes are unstoppable less so; not only is any crime stoppable, if stoppable means reducing the yearly instances of it. It's disproven because the crime numbers have gone up since these policies have been implemented and we've reduced incarceration rates. It's a correlation that you can't ignore.
Your humanitarian argument is absolutely legitimate, how we deal with people who steal, often out of necessity due to addiction, mental illness, or other desperation. It's hard to say that punishment is always an inhumane option though. We can't run a society and dense cities without an enforcement of some order, since that concerns the other 99% who aren't committing these crimes. If pharmacies close and parks are unusable, everyone suffers.
Read The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment by CS Lewis [1].
The other position is that humans need to be cured of their problems. At which point the "humanitarians" who arbitrarily decide these things, basically will endlessly torture people into conformance. They medicalize justice. With the permission of their own conscience, they will cure people of things they may not even regard as a state of disease. Of course these "diseases" are a subjective matter. What some people regard as unpleasant ways to live, others don't.
[1]: http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ResJud/1954/30.pdf
The problem is I have to live under the mayors you vote for because there's a few more of you than me.
> locking a human in a cage without rehabilitation for years of their life
A human who isn't worth letting out even if it were safe to do so. Net positive to society. I'd rather imprison one person than sentence another to a mugging or rape. The CVS employees have rights too.
> make the problem worse and cost us a ridiculous amount of money (and humanity)
Explain the humanity loss to someone mugged or raped by a repeat offender.
> why they happen here more than other nations
Why are more rapes reported in Sweden than India? Because more rapes happen, or more rapes are reported? In many countries if you tried to shoplift you'd simply be beaten and thrown out. In the USA police are called and a report is written.
As for which nation is safer, it depends if you're a criminal or not.
Even if you are super cynical, throwing a shoplifter in jail accomplishes what? If they have a job, they'll lose their job. If they have a home, they'll probably get evicted. They'll have to go through a court system that has to deal with this. People will have to do a bunch of work to move this person through the system.
And at the end of the day someone goes to jail a bit and leaves, and there's no safety net, so they're just permanently worse off. Congrats, you not only wasted an outsized amount of resources for petty theft, but now the person is back in society with less means of getting anything done in a legal way.
If you consider people to actually be people who you want to see improve, there's a hell of a lot better things to be done than putting people in jail for petty theft. At least in the US system.
Go too hard the other direction and the the people who have more to lose will risk it all rather than watch it slowly erode.
What other crimes do you hold this standard with? Should rapists and murders not go to jail since bankers get away with crimes?
>Even if you are super cynical, throwing a shoplifter in jail accomplishes what?
It removes a person willing to shoplift from society.
>If they have a job, they'll lose their job. If they have a home, they'll probably get evicted. They'll have to go through a court system that has to deal with this. People will have to do a bunch of work to move this person through the system.
Same thing happens with any criminal. Why not avoid the paper work and avoid arresting murderers.
>And at the end of the day someone goes to jail a bit and leaves, and there's no safety net, so they're just permanently worse off. Congrats, you not only wasted an outsized amount of resources for petty theft, but now the person is back in society with less means of getting anything done in a legal way.
>If you consider people to actually be people who you want to see improve, there's a hell of a lot better things to be done than putting people in jail for petty theft. At least in the US system.
Perhaps this is true, but you are putting the cart before the horse. We need to fix the things you mentioned before we avoid jail time.
I leave the problem of getting perfectly upstanding policemen who will not abuse their powers as an exercise to the reader.
Look at things like food deserts for an example of why allowing high theft is bad. Crime is so normal in these areas that its not even viable to bring in food in exchange for money.
This isn't some poor single mom who can't afford an extra $20 a month to feed her baby, stealing formula. Watch the videos - crews of five to ten are walking into a store and looting it systematically - expensive cosmetics and other non-essentials - and beating anyone who interferes. Regardless of the violence it just gets called "shoplifting" in the news.
You're minimizing organized crime that results in attempted murderer simply because the predicate crime sounds small.
Raises hand: uh, I think harshly punishing crimes works just fine. Things were pretty safe while I was growing up, in fact it was even getting safer every year. It really wasn't until we actually did "try something different" with these DAs who don't believe in prosecution and the defund movements that crime actually started to go up again.
Unfortunately economy is boring and the media/congress would rather talk about stupid side issues that effect no one.