Hacker News Reader

Comment by jzwinck | Hacker News Reader

If you want to reduce bicycle theft in the US, the solution is simple: drastically increase the penalties for perpetrators. Get caught stealing a bike? One year in jail. Adjust until the level of theft is where you want it to be.

Stealing a bike is not just taking $300 or whatever from the owner. It's robbing that cyclist and would-be cyclists of the confidence to use their preferred mode of transportation, and deteriorating their health in the long term. This is a lot more damaging than non-cyclists often intuit, and insurance cannot cover it. The penalty for stealing bicycles should be closer to the penalty for stealing a car and intentionally injuring someone. Currently it's close to zero.

View on HN

I understand the motivation behind what you're suggesting but I don't think jail time is a fair deterrent.

I think (this is anecdata from some bike theft victims, including myself) that there are folks who steal bikes to ride them, potentially for transportation to work/school, and those who steal bikes to sell them elsewhere.

We should find a way to deter both groups but putting someone in jail for a $300 (let's say $600 to cover some of the unintended effects you mention) probably won't stop the commercial thieves as they'll find other lackeys to do the theft.

On a more important note, I feel uncomfortable having someone locked up, costing taxpayer money, for committing a non-violent crime whose damages are less than two weeks' pay at minimum wage.

I had a bike stolen from me, when someone broke into my back yard(breaking down the gate), sawed off the railing the bike was attached to and took the bike together with the railing(the bike was attached with a Kryptonite lock, which I guess was a lot harder to break than the railing itself). Yeah you're right, the crime was not violent, and the bike was worth 2x the minimum wage where I come from, which is not a lot(~800 USD). The gate was also fairly easy to fix, as was the railing.

But it's not the violence or the financial damage. It was the fact that I stopped feeling safe in my own house. That the area that I once though was friendly and safe is now filling me with dread and I was so worried about living there that year later I had to move out. That every time I heard noises in the back yard I had to get out of my bed and look out of the window. I shrugged off the financial loss of my bike very easily - but the physiological damage was much greater. Now if you asked me if I want the bike thieves to be put in prison, I would say - absolutely, positively yes. I hate and despise people who steal and I understand how deeply theft can affect a well being of a person, regardless of the value of stolen goods.

I felt exactly the same way after a gang stole a camera lens from my bag while it was strapped onto my body in Russia. They (3-5 people) surrounded me on a street in broad daylight, shoved me in various directions, separated my $1000 lens from myself, and ran off. I had a new lens shipped to me in a week, but the psychological change has lasted for years.

So how do we deter people from stealing other people's stuff without jail time or financial penalty? Where is the dollar limit? You have one else you would not bandy about numbers. Three hundred might not be much to some of us but for others it might be that weeks pay. Should the penalty be proportional to the effect it has on the victim? Steal from the poor and suffer more?

Crime occurs when penalties make it more profitable to commit the crime than not. The cost to society is paying to prosecute, reform, or lockup, people who do not adhere to the standards of the society they live in.

How about community service, at minimum wage until the work equals the value of what was stolen even if even the items were recovered? It will cost society money to manage it but it keeps the person off the street for part of the day and might teach them something useful, like being polite in a polite society

Spoken like a true American ! After all, if stealing a king size snickers bar deserves 16 years (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/040700-01.htm), stealing a bicycle needs some serious deterrent sentencing. Sure, he was a recidivist and had previously stolen some Oreo cookies too !

Or, it's a bicycle - keep things in proportion. Sure it sucks to have stuff stolen (I've been a victim too) but crazy disproportionate sentencing has made criminal justice in the US just insane.

Your proposal sounds great, just like all the other get tough on crime initiatives over the past 40 odd years but it has left the US with what looks like the craziest most vengeful 'justice' system outside of the Sharia introduced by ISIS.

It's all great until you happen to fall foul of these get tough initiatives - see lots of previous HN stories for examples.

I don't live in America. When I did, I felt more similar to how you do now. Today I live somewhere with harsh penalties for crimes, and the effects are very visible. You can leave your smartphone on a table while you go buy food and no one will take it. People lock up pretty decent bikes with simple cable locks. Peace of mind is worth something; protecting people who steal is not helping anyone.

I thought this would be obvious, but I am not arguing for 16 year sentences for stealing food. Food theft is one thing for which the penalty is a real conundrum (maybe the guy was really hungry).

I can believe there are places that happen to have both harsh penalties and low crime rates, but I'm more skeptical of a general relationship. I believe studies in the U.S. have found that varying probability of punishment significantly varies deterrence (people aren't deterred if they believe they have a low chance of being caught), but that revising sentence levels upwards or downwards has virtually no effect.

As long as we're trading anecdotes, I live somewhere with very lenient penalties for crimes and what you describe is also true here. People typically don't even bother with a cable lock, they just use an O-lock [1] that locks the rear wheel to itself, whose main purpose is to make it inconvenient to ride off with the bike.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_city_bike#O-lock

They've done studies on the effect of increasing penalties on crime, and it's virtually nil.

Who are "they"?

Researchers. There have been innumerable studies on the subject - but really it's common sense. If you're a criminal you're unlikely to be particularly adept at the art of deliberation - otherwise you would choose a different way of life. But for evidence here's a somewhat recent review: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1147698?uid=3739920&ui...

Also, interestingly, deterrence is not the primary reason most people push for harsher penalties. Rather it is punishment for its own sake: http://www.law.asu.edu/files/!NoTemplate/why%20do%20we%20pun...

In islamic countries with sharia law, nobody steals, since you risk loosing a hand. Not that I recommend that approach, but I'd be careful with such statements.

In islamic countries with sharia law, nobody steals, since you risk loosing a hand

Really? Do you have any evidence to back up that claim?

I know people that grew up there. I believe them. Thats all I can say.

If you can manage to prove that statement you'll basically have proven the P=NP of criminology

Guess you're right - I shouldn't have posted this on HN.

Sounds like bullshit.

If that was the case they would not be whipping, beheading, stoning, maiming and executing people in these countries. (spoiler:they are doing all of these things).

It's like saying because of the death penalty there are no murders in states that enforce the death penalty. When in actual fact it looks like it poses no deterrent at all.

That seems unlikely given that ISIS has apparently been stealing the homes and possessions of the Yazidi.

> If you want to reduce bicycle theft in the US, the solution is simple: drastically increase the penalties for perpetrators

Then why don't we just give every crime the death penalty? Boom, overnight there's no more crime!

> drastically increase the penalties for perpetrators

We could start at the start: increase the risk of getting caught at all, to something not zero.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com