It's quite different from "real world stealing". For a hacker, he only steals information and sells it. The actual money is siphoned out further down the chain

It's quite different from "real world stealing". For a hacker, he only steals information and sells it. The actual money is siphoned out further down the chain by the people that buy stolen cc numbers and actually milk them... Most of these "hackers" are just stupid kids that think along the lines of "hey, I just stole these bits of data from there and then sold them to this other guy for profit". Some even do it simply for the "high", as an antidote for depression or other mental issues, they could probably make even more money by simply finding a decent job that matched their skills set. These kids are 99% harmless to society because they would never commit any violent crimes like an armed robbery or even a purely financial crime that would involve directly stealing from someone they can identify. Now, put them in jail for XX years, maybe even parole them and force them to work for a lowest payed wage for gov agency ABC (cough, helping it spy on its own citizens, without the risk of "crying wolf" like ES did, cough) to keep their "conditional freedom" (though this probably only happens for the most skilled of them), and at the end of it you will have transformed them into pissed off anti-social criminals that are ripe to engage in real violent criminal activities or ripe for recruitment by teorist cells... From society's point of view, this is like smoking harder in order to cure your lung cancer...