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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

Many porch pirates have decent jobs and plenty of money. They do it because they're greedy, it's easy and the penalties for getting caught are light. We need to revise our criminal code to apply harsher penalties to this kind of behavior. Porch piracy isn't a crime of 'passion', the people who do it presently think that the rewards are worth the risks and this can be fixed by escalating the risks.

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> We need to revise our criminal code to apply harsher penalties to this kind of behavior.

We'd have to be careful about that since research shows that past a certain point harsher penalties do not act as a deterrent. It might be that being a little bit harsher improves the situation, but the tendency is the US is to go way overboard to the point that the US locks up more of its citizens than any other nation on Earth, and even an arrest is enough to cause someone to lose their job while a conviction can cause someone to because virtually unemployable for the rest of their lives.

It might be better to focus on making it more likely that people are caught at all for stealing packages than increasing punishments for the ones that do get caught.

Being caught is the problem. If there's a 100% chance of getting caught, like grabbing the box while the owner is right there talking to a police officer, that deters this kind of crime

I think this is the reason Amazon bought Ring. But the criminal justice system still needs to uphold their end.

Seems like something reasonable like a few months in jail would very quickly solve this. It would not be too harsh punishment to stop this sort of theft.

There are places were people aren't so inclined to steal in the first place. I'd say the difference is a cultural one.

"Societal community spirit" or something like that. Some places in the US have it, some don't.

Wage theft is the largest theft category by value (withheld wages, illegally docked wages, etc.) - and from studies it is carried out pretty universally across the country. Why might that be? Why is it when people think of theft, their first thought it's the business person or manager that come to mind as the people we should be going after for theft?

Quote: Workers in the US have an estimated $50bn-plus stolen from them every year

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-u...

Because it's more ambiguous, being based on estimations. The situation in the article sounds like a breach of contract rather than criminal, who should be "going after" them?

Says a lot that we treat theft from a workers wages as 'just contractual' - let's not get the police involved. If that same worker stole from the till?

You don't get the police involved because you can go to the courts..

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