5 ms·

Do you honestly think shoplifters should be locked in a cage?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
concordDance 4y ago
Ideally they'd be given corporal punishment by perfectly morally upstanding cops. This is cheap, fast, doesn't stop them working and doesn't put them in an environment where they're around lots of hardened convicts. I leave the problem of getting perfectly upstanding policemen who will not abuse their powers as an exercise to the reader.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  Oh, I got this one! Just replace the cops with objective, completely fair AI! That will surely solve all of the problems and definitely hasn't been extensively worried about in science fiction for decades.
mancerayder 4y ago
Certainly not for one offense, or even two. Someone who behaves outside the law consistently needs to be dissuaded though. What suggestions do you have?
Vaslo 4y ago
What punishment do you suggest then? The unacceptable answer is none.
- standardUser 4y ago
  The fact that the only solution you see is "punishment" is exactly the problem. No reasonable punishment will stop these crimes. Period. And unreasonable punishments, like locking a human in a cage without rehabilitation for years of their life, only make the problem worse and cost us a ridiculous amount of money (and humanity). 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.
  - mancerayder 4y ago
    >The fact that the only solution you see is "punishment" is exactly the problem. No reasonable punishment will stop these crimes. Period. 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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - taolegal 4y ago
    Punishment is about desert, rooted in morality. A sin/crime/misdeed just definitionally deserves punishment. 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 http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ResJud/1954/30.pdf
  - Epitom3 4y ago
    Can't even argue with someone who thinks like this. But in an ideal situation, you would get to live in a city with no prosecution for theft and I get to live somewhere with harsh punishment for theft. The problem is I have to live under the mayors you vote for because there's a few more of you than me.
  - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
- rtpg 4y ago
  If bankers can get away with treble damages, then maybe shoplifters should to. 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.
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    >If bankers can get away with treble damages, then maybe shoplifters should to 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.
  - erfgh 4y ago
    Throwing shoplifters in jail results in other people afraid of trying shoplifting because if they do they might end up in jail.
lmm 4y ago
Yes, or worse. Fuck 'em, frankly.
- standardUser 4y ago
  We have been, obviously. That's why we have the largest prison population in the world (and we have to pay for it). It just doesn't work. So if you actually care about reducing crime, and not just getting petty revenge, shouldn't we try something different finally?
  - lmm 4y ago
    And yet the bump in property crime is coincident with noticeable recent slackening off, especially on property crime. I'm all for exploring what works, but not prosecuting shoplifters goes in the failed experiment bucket at this point IMO.
  - uejfiweun 4y ago
    > It just doesn't work. 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.
    - standardUser 4y ago
      Things are safe now, from my perspective. And from a statistical perspective, crime today is dramatically lower than the 70s and 80s. When did you grow up?
  - vinyl7 4y ago
    Why not both instead of relying on one? Fix the broken economy, and punish people. That should reduce crime, lower the prison population, while still punishing those who actually deserve it. Unfortunately economy is boring and the media/congress would rather talk about stupid side issues that effect no one.
robertoandred 4y ago
Why not? They’re a danger to society otherwise.
- standardUser 4y ago
  If a person steals some makeup from a drug store, what danger do you face? What exactly is the danger you feel you are in?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - balderdash 4y ago
    tell that to the people that work in theses stores and are being threatened and menaced
  - yadaeno 4y ago
    The danger is sliding the Overton window so that society becomes accepting of theft, which makes life objectively worse for everyone including the thieves. 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.
    - standardUser 4y ago
      The Overton window is being shifted by an economy of poverty, not a marginal decrease in low-level prosecutions. FFS.
  - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
    You're laughably sheltered. The same person would set a baby afire to get drugs. By refusing to get them off the street at the first intervention you're setting some poor schmo up to take the fall, robbery, beating, or death. 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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Ideally they'd be given corporal punishment by perfectly morally upstanding cops. This is cheap, fast, doesn't stop them working and doesn't put them in an environment where they're around lots of hardened convicts. I leave the problem of getting perfectly upstanding policemen who will not abuse their powers as an exercise to the reader.

vanilla_nut 4y ago
Oh, I got this one! Just replace the cops with objective, completely fair AI! That will surely solve all of the problems and definitely hasn't been extensively worried about in science fiction for decades.

mancerayder 4y ago

Certainly not for one offense, or even two. Someone who behaves outside the law consistently needs to be dissuaded though. What suggestions do you have?

Vaslo 4y ago

What punishment do you suggest then? The unacceptable answer is none.

standardUser 4y ago
The fact that the only solution you see is "punishment" is exactly the problem. No reasonable punishment will stop these crimes. Period. And unreasonable punishments, like locking a human in a cage without rehabilitation for years of their life, only make the problem worse and cost us a ridiculous amount of money (and humanity). 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.
- mancerayder 4y ago
  >The fact that the only solution you see is "punishment" is exactly the problem. No reasonable punishment will stop these crimes. Period. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- taolegal 4y ago
  Punishment is about desert, rooted in morality. A sin/crime/misdeed just definitionally deserves punishment. 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 http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ResJud/1954/30.pdf
- Epitom3 4y ago
  Can't even argue with someone who thinks like this. But in an ideal situation, you would get to live in a city with no prosecution for theft and I get to live somewhere with harsh punishment for theft. The problem is I have to live under the mayors you vote for because there's a few more of you than me.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
rtpg 4y ago
If bankers can get away with treble damages, then maybe shoplifters should to. 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.
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  >If bankers can get away with treble damages, then maybe shoplifters should to 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.
- erfgh 4y ago
  Throwing shoplifters in jail results in other people afraid of trying shoplifting because if they do they might end up in jail.

lmm 4y ago

Yes, or worse. Fuck 'em, frankly.

standardUser 4y ago
We have been, obviously. That's why we have the largest prison population in the world (and we have to pay for it). It just doesn't work. So if you actually care about reducing crime, and not just getting petty revenge, shouldn't we try something different finally?
- lmm 4y ago
  And yet the bump in property crime is coincident with noticeable recent slackening off, especially on property crime. I'm all for exploring what works, but not prosecuting shoplifters goes in the failed experiment bucket at this point IMO.
- uejfiweun 4y ago
  > It just doesn't work. 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.
  - standardUser 4y ago
    Things are safe now, from my perspective. And from a statistical perspective, crime today is dramatically lower than the 70s and 80s. When did you grow up?
- vinyl7 4y ago
  Why not both instead of relying on one? Fix the broken economy, and punish people. That should reduce crime, lower the prison population, while still punishing those who actually deserve it. Unfortunately economy is boring and the media/congress would rather talk about stupid side issues that effect no one.

robertoandred 4y ago

Why not? They’re a danger to society otherwise.

standardUser 4y ago
If a person steals some makeup from a drug store, what danger do you face? What exactly is the danger you feel you are in?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- balderdash 4y ago
  tell that to the people that work in theses stores and are being threatened and menaced
- yadaeno 4y ago
  The danger is sliding the Overton window so that society becomes accepting of theft, which makes life objectively worse for everyone including the thieves. 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.
  - standardUser 4y ago
    The Overton window is being shifted by an economy of poverty, not a marginal decrease in low-level prosecutions. FFS.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  You're laughably sheltered. The same person would set a baby afire to get drugs. By refusing to get them off the street at the first intervention you're setting some poor schmo up to take the fall, robbery, beating, or death. 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.