Theft is solved by making society better, not worse. Make people not want or reliant upon crime to survive.
I think it's ok to define "survive" as an addict who needs (<-also loosely defined) a fix.
You don't generally commit serious white collar crime, tax fraud or do crypto grifts to survive. For petty street crime, I don't really see any other motivation.
The US tried "tough on crime" approaches, what has it resulted in? 25% of the entire world's prison population and it still has higher crime rates than its peer nations.
That's into the absurdist territory, but it reflects the real pattern of behavior. People do go around committing petty crimes for various reasons.
I think there are many other and better things to try than the repeated failure of trying to catch and punish crimes even more harshly.
Phew, good to hear. Here I thought it would be a hard and complex problem, with lots of unknown unknowns, difficult political compromises, a generation-spanning efforts and many potential solutions with uncertain outcomes, partially contradicting each other.
Instead, we just have to make society better. So, what's step 1?
And if you are still worried about theft in the mean time, you could try looking at wage thefts which has a value greater than all other forms of theft combined.
That would make society better, I agree, but I don't see how that would lead to a reduction in theft, or crime in general.
> And if you are still worried about theft in the mean time, you could try looking at wage thefts […]
I'm not worried about wage theft, no. I am worried about theft of my personal property, though. And I notice that you haven't proposed any credible path to reducing it, beyond an incredibly generic "make society better", whatever that means and however you want to achieve that.
Do we have any sources that people are stealing to survive? What definition of surviving are we using here?