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No amount of deterrent is going to remove the motivation of petty thieves. Give them better means to live a dignified existence without resorting to crime and t

No amount of deterrent is going to remove the motivation of petty thieves. Give them better means to live a dignified existence without resorting to crime and the problem disappears. Such solutions implicitly demand rethinking housing policy, social welfare and jobs programs. A couple other equally effective, on paper, solutions would be imprisonment and slavery of petty thieves, or murdering them (capital punishment, near genocide, crime against humanity). It's important to consider the privilege, assets, and what people stand to gain or lose when considering solutions. I've got no dog in the fight over problems in California. What's clear is that these problems are systemic and demand a federal solution. The people responsible to enact a federal solution are beholden to the people who stand to lose the most if these systemic issues of housing, healthcare, income, and the like are solved. Tech workers have more in common with the homeless people they step over to get to work than the f500 CEOs telling paying Congress to stall and distract. Bridging this class divide and building solidarity with people we've been taught to think ourselves better than is a foundational step in building the grassroots needed to force change.

mythrwy 5y ago
Wow that's a lot of buzzwords in one post! Is a federal solution more likely to be effective for thefts under $950 or is a tailored localized solution?
- maxlybbert 5y ago
  Federal courts generally aren’t overloaded the way state courts are, and federal prisons generally aren’t overcrowded the way state prisons are. But if theft of less than $1000 in property became a federal crime that would certainly increase the number of federal cases and federal prisoners. There’s also a question of how to shoehorn smaller theft into a federal crime. It can be done — any bank robbery is a federal crime regardless of how much money is stolen — but it isn’t straightforward.
CheezeIt 5y ago
Where I am in California there’s signs up everywhere begging for employees. The wage restaurants need to pay to have a dishwasher in some part of Los Angeles is $21/hr as of a couple weeks ago. We don’t need deterrent to stop petty thieves. We can just escalate prison sentences exponentially so that we get O(log n) crime instead of O(n).

mythrwy 5y ago

Wow that's a lot of buzzwords in one post! Is a federal solution more likely to be effective for thefts under $950 or is a tailored localized solution?

maxlybbert 5y ago
Federal courts generally aren’t overloaded the way state courts are, and federal prisons generally aren’t overcrowded the way state prisons are. But if theft of less than $1000 in property became a federal crime that would certainly increase the number of federal cases and federal prisoners. There’s also a question of how to shoehorn smaller theft into a federal crime. It can be done — any bank robbery is a federal crime regardless of how much money is stolen — but it isn’t straightforward.

CheezeIt 5y ago

Where I am in California there’s signs up everywhere begging for employees. The wage restaurants need to pay to have a dishwasher in some part of Los Angeles is $21/hr as of a couple weeks ago. We don’t need deterrent to stop petty thieves. We can just escalate prison sentences exponentially so that we get O(log n) crime instead of O(n).