>An ex-convict has very few options for employment after they've served their time, so it's unsurprising that many need to steal for their survival
This trope has little to do with the recent spate of property crimes that spiked right after criminal penalties were removed. These are not desperate people, but rather people who willfully and repeatedly exploit an opportunity to harm others without punishment.
> I think you'll find that you are in the minority. Look at laws for felony theft.
I think the laws for felony theft as compared to the laws for murder and rape are pretty solid evidence that rape and murder are considered more serious crimes than theft. And that's setting aside that there are plenty of theft laws that are even less serious than felony theft. In cases where people are stealing to meet their basic needs such as food or housing, it's not uncommon for perpetrators to receive lenient sentences including probation with no prison time.
What's your argument for landlordism not being theft? Shouldn't those people get a job too? Or is theft only a crime when poor people do it?
> people make mistakes and most of the time the victim notices quite soon.
This is exactly why it's a poor gamble to make in most circumstances.
I'm not offering prescriptive advice. I'm not advocating that someone should steal or break contracts. I'm merely describing reality. If the reward outweighs the risk for someone, they'll come along and do it. That's a simple fact. Pretending it doesn't exist and we should all just be nice is only going to cause people to lose money. Either decrease the reward or increase the risk until that isn't the case.
People put locks on their doors and keep their money in banks instead of in a big pile on their front lawn. Why? Don't criminals know it's wrong to take things that don't belong to them, even it it's sitting right there in plain sight for the taking? Why don't we just depend on the values of honesty and integrity? Wouldn't that be so easy and great?
Locks are pretty easily defeated, but they provide enough of a hassle and increase the probability of detection enough that it's not worthwhile for most people to bother. If all your valuables are sitting on the lawn, some people who would never kick down your door might run up and grab them. Why? Are they "assholes" and "douchebags"? Maybe. But the incentives and penalties also shifted so there's less risk, increasing the probability that someone will find it worthwhile to take the chance.
Someone who would never rob a bank might steal a sandwich if they were starving. Did they suddenly give up on the implicit social contract? No, the possibility of dying of starvation just became a larger risk to them than whatever penalty might exist for sandwich thievery.
In practice, I think the AirBnB subletters are just exploiting a temporary knowledge gap between the landlords and the AirBnB guests. With enough articles like this one, landlords will wise up and close the gap, either listing their properties on AirBnB themselves, or checking occasionally that their properties aren't listed there and shutting down the lease if they are. The subletters obviously have no leg to stand on, legally. Once they have a few evictions for breach of contract on their record, they won't be able to get a lease anywhere anymore. More's the pity for them, but that's the risk they took.
>and someone will somewhen, way before the heat death of the universe
Probably. But then again, by definition we have no knowledge of crimes that nobody notices. There could be an untold number of crimes that have gone unnoticed.
> Come on, the problem is not that it's easy to steal, the problem is that society has constructed situations for some of its citizens where they for one reason or another do it.
I assume you're talking about poor people. I don't know how much experience you have with lower socio-economic people in the US, but from my experience, most are honest hardworking and industrious. Some are immigrants without a formal education or even language skills that came to this country for opportunity.
It's a little offensive to deny them basic autonomy to not steal and trash a rail-yard. The people that I came across in my life that do petty crime like this are not poor desperate people. They're usually highly anti-social borderline sociopaths. They're organized by informal networks of other people exploiting them. There's organization involved to keep lookout, know when and were to go and how to avoid getting caught. And if you get caught, there is a whole system around that as well. And since they're organized, they are fully aware of the risk-reward tradeoffs. This includes the recent trend of being soft on these kinds of crimes or looking the other way, as you're doing.
Think about the skill you need to pull this off. You need to be young and physically fit, to run from police. You have to be able to keep a lot of information in your head and make snap decisions about what to open, what to keep and what to toss. You have to show up on time and plan. The people doing these heists could easily be employed as warehouse or delivery workers and make an honest, probably even more lucrative living, especially when you consider long term risk of being arrested. They choose not to.
> Disregard for property is not the motivating factor for these artists.
Probably true, but isn't that true for nearly all property crime?
Very few bicycle thieves for example are motivated by disregard for the cyclist's property. They are motivated because they want the money that they can get for the bike. Same with car thieves, bank robbers, pickpockets, and purse snatchers.
> There's no community well-being here to preserve, they are stealing and profiting.
I agree that they're stealing and profiting from someone else's resources but there is a community cost to someone receiving a criminal record or worse for a relatively minor crime. And was it a friend's son or someone else only a few degrees of association away?
They should be punished if they continue after being warned but when the punishment exceeds the grade of the crime, anyone concerned about community would stop to ponder the cost-benefit of reporting the thieves. What we should have is punishments that better suit the severity of the crime, like community service.
In the Everyone Wins category: the thieves apologise, return the remaining walnuts and any money made, and offer to help the owner tend to their house and garden. Alternatively they can sell the walnuts on the owners behalf, generating money without having to pay for labour. In the everybody loses category: you strip someone of their ability to get certain jobs due to a criminal record and they turn to more crime to make up for the shortfall in income. Or you send them to jail and rather than having a well-tended-to garden your tax dollars are paying to have a harmless thief in prison.
> Nobody would steal if he could get something of his own some easier way. Nobody will commit burglary when he has a house full.
is complete nonsense when contrasted against modern times.
All the thieves in jail are not there because they stole to feed their family or some other noble deed.
> isn't just about incentivizing would-be thieves to not do it
If the law around petty theft doesn't actually reduce the number of petty thefts that happen, then all it's doing on a societal level is wasting money.
>I think they are being robbed because it's easy to do so, with a low risk for any consequences. Similarly as to why shoplifting in LA is up.
Ok, then why aren't you robbing or shoplifting if it's so easy and risk-free? Is it because you have too much to lose if you get caught?
My whole point is that if people have a minimal standard of living, the fear of losing it will prevent them from committing crimes much more effectively than some nut shooting at them
I don’t agree with the statement the “crime is opportunistic,” that if you just remove the opportunity, you will remove the crime. That seems very, very narrow-sighted. I think a lot of theft crime comes from an absence of hope, no hope for better jobs, no hope for education, so why not? What stops a person from committing a crime? That’s really big big question, and I think when you have high poverty areas, high concentration of poverty, you encounter concentration of people who have no hope, no future, no jobs, no education, so why care? Steal. Anything to break the monotony seems worth the risk.
> the original post that is showing how giving people money helps them improve their lives
To be clear, I'm not arguing against this claim.
> Are you not understanding that the majority of crime that exists in a society is petty crime that doesn’t cause any serious physical harm to others or society at large?
What do you mean by "petty crime?" If it's something like driving 75mph on a 65mph highway, then yes that shouldn't generally merit a harsh legal response. But petty theft, shoplifting, minor vandalism, small-scale drug dealing, school bullying etc make life miserable for people who can't afford to live far away from it. The first-order effects are bad enough, but the countless second-order effects (reduced economic investment, lower consumer spending, having to live in fear every day, can't take the bus to work, etc) are absolutely devastating. And yes, even in the poorest communities, where people are the most desperate, the vast majority still follow the law and don't resort to victimizing others.
> steal and then sell anything ... all for a couple dollars
When people's socioeconomic situation is so incredibly messed up and they know the system doesn't care about them, they'll do whatever they have to to survive. The cracks in the system have always been pushed to the fringes of society where the middle and upper class didn't have to pay attention to them, but now the cracks are visible downtown.
> Everything is violence if you think hard enough.
Yes, very much this. "Violent" crimes clearly have a more evident immediate danger, but all theft is violence (though the scope might not be immediately evident).
This applies especially so toward individuals who are already low-income. Steal a low-income person's wages, and they fall deeper into the pit of poverty. They can't make their rent payment, their electric bill, they overdraw their account maybe. They haven't just had an hour or two stolen from them.
Realistically, somebody who is the victim of petty theft is not responsible for the circumstances that led somebody to become a thief. Expecting people who were robbed to feel ashamed that they were robbed is absurd. They are a victim. Not to mention that most people do not have the resources to relocate themselves to a country with less crime. Greggman expecting these people to feel ashamed that they have been unable to flee their country is worse than absurd; it is patently offensive.
If the thief can be said to be a victim of circumstance and therefore not responsible for their actions, then the same can be said even more strongly of their victims.
“doing poor people things (stealing to stay alive or pay rent). No sympathy for WalMart from me.”
No sympathy for you from me. There will always be people on both sides of the spectrum. There’s people who work hard to pay rent without resorting to criminality. In fact this is more common than your characterization that if you’re poor you steal, or as you call it “poor people things”. What an insult to those people.
I suppose you condone the gross shoplifting and then the slippery slope to committing felonies.
>"The people committing this level of crime do need the income this theft generates to survive."
Later on I knew people who stole electronics --not as juveniles any more. It was just easy money for a night's work. They didn't have to put in 40. Didn't have a foreman. They'd brag about how easy it was...
So, I don't believe they have not alternative but this. It may be an "easier" option compared to other options, but it's not their last option. No. People in the Eastern block had less purchasing power than a poor person in the US. They did not have a culture of thievery. One, they were not a consumerist society and two, they would give no quarter to thieves.
> but that strong link starts to weaken when you look across different societies, especially in the same region
I'm not surprised by this, one would expect things like the ease of getting a weapon, cultural norms, and social welfare services to have big interactions with the poverty - crime relationships.
> And in a society as rich as the US, most are stealing because of a want, not stealing to fulfill a biological need like housing, medication, or food.
This is not as clear to me, though I imagine it also strongly depends on the type of theft under consideration. Certainly I concede that most theft in the US is probably not pure Jean Valjean-style "I just needed a loaf of bread", but in my experience the people committing like smash+grabs out of a parked car are not typically very affluent. Maybe they're doing this because they can't afford the iPhone they want since all their savings went to rent and food, but I don't think you can fully say that it's purely "desire" causing them to act criminally.
Re the poor impulse control side of things, I think it would be very hard to isolate the causal direction between it and poverty. I can imagine someone working multiple part time jobs to get by is going to have a harder time controlling their impulses purely out of fatigue and stress. Not sure if this is what you're thinking
This trope has little to do with the recent spate of property crimes that spiked right after criminal penalties were removed. These are not desperate people, but rather people who willfully and repeatedly exploit an opportunity to harm others without punishment.
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