[waste_monk]

>In a high enough crime area otherwise honest people are gonna engage in opportunistic crime because "if I don't someone will".

That is probably the weakest excuse for criminal behaviour I've ever heard. "Someone else was going to steal that car, so it might as well be me"? Bullshit.

If someone's an "honest person" who only engages in crime when they think they can get away with it due to it being unlikely the police will follow up, they never had personal integrity or principles to begin with - they just hadn't been put in a situation where the cost/value proposition of commmiting a crime was worth it.

[dsfyu404ed]

Maybe stealing cars is a bit of the stretch but if you create more opportunity for crime there will be more crime.

A better example is when the cops stick an under cover officer on the street corner as a hooker and of course she gets picked up because someone who would never pick up a hooker sees one that doesn't have a million hard miles on her and decides to give it a go.

I know my local police used to leave rolls of copper wire on job sites to bait people to steal them. Of course nobody with a brain would leave an unsecured roll of copper wire around like that so the opportunity for the crime doesn't normally ever exist except when the police are baiting.

Both those examples are baiting people who wouldn't otherwise consider the risk reward to be worth it to engage in crime.

[jcranmer]

Your argument here is boiling down to someone saying "I'm normally a law-abiding citizen, but the crime was just so easy to commit, how could I resist?" To which the proper response is of course "Learn some self-restraint, that's how you could resist."

[logfromblammo]

"You wouldn't be poor, if you worked hard enough to earn more money."

"You wouldn't be fat, if you ate a reasonable amount of healthy foods instead of calorie-rich junk."

"You wouldn't be a criminal, if you had enough moral fiber to obey the law."

I think you are intentionally ignoring a lot of circumstantial factors that have been scrubbed from the strawman hypotheticals.

I believe the canonical example for rating someone on a scale of morality is as follows:

Jack's child is very sick, and may die. The doctor gave him a prescription for a drug that would cure his child in one dose, but when he took it to the pharmacist, he found that they had some in stock, but that single dose cost more than he has ever saved at one time, and even if he could get a loan big enough to buy it, he would never be able to pay off the debt. Jack did notice some holes in the pharmacy's security, though. Should he break in to steal the drug, to save his child? Why?

There are a lot of ways to answer the why, for the question as posed. We are also adding some additional questions. When Jack is caught, how severely should he be punished? Does the reasoning behind the situation change if the police operate the pharmacy as a front, and intentionally inflate the price of life-saving drugs and weaken security, in order to more easily catch people who might rob pharmacies, if allowed the opportunity?

[dsfyu404ed]

Well yes of course but people's morals get flexible when relatively (relative to them) large amounts of benefit to them (usually money) are involved.

For example, I'm too well paid to shoot you over $10, $100, $1000, $10k, etc. but you keep tacking on zeros and eventually it gets tempting. It's like that but with smaller dollar amounts. People rationalize petty theft all the time by saying things like "well it was there and they weren't using it and I was going to put it (or the money made selling it) to good use". They know it's wrong but they just can't help themselves.

[waste_monk]

Both of those examples (regardless of whether or not you think sex work should be a criminal matter) are still people knowingly committing crimes.

It doesn't matter whether it was a bait roll of copper wire or a real roll that some person neglected to secure properly, the problem is that they had an opportunity to steal, and took it. Intent matters.

[logfromblammo]

Motive is only one third of the crime triangle. Method and opportunity are usually denied by even the least effort at security. As ancestor posts have mentioned, real people would no more leave a roll of copper wire lying around unsecured than they would leave a $100 bill under a paperweight on a city sidewalk.

The morality encoded into the justice system is not built for the benefit of the people typically getting sent to prisons. Those people may have some ethically defensible justification for having motive to commit crimes. It would not be an arguments the courts would care to entertain, of course. But the argument still remains for all those of us who are not judges. Property laws protect those who already own property, at the expense of those who do not. The enforcement of property law typically tells those who have suffered "petty" property crime to fill out a report and sod off, while those who suffered "grand" property crime get the benefit of police investigation. Ever had a bike stolen? Ever had a car stolen? If the bicycle is one's only means of transportation, and the police refuse to help, so they can investigate the theft of a car from someone that owns two, that person now has a reasonable motive to steal bicycles: society owes them one, and apparently does not consider it a crime worth investigating.

If the law does not equally benefit everyone, those who benefit least are not ethically bound to obey it. If the rules of the game stipulate that a given player cannot ever win, or even advance to second place, that player is justified in not playing the game, or in cheating. In such a situation, would it be better to be vigilant at all times, to stop everyone from cheating (including the winners), or to help the losers to cheat a little, then immediately report their cheating to the other players (eliding over the help that was given), so they can be further penalized? The latter is a dick move, and the former more desirable.

This is why you lock your bicycle to an immovable object during the day, and bring it inside at night. And this is why you secure the spool of copper wire before leaving the jobsite. And this is why you lock your car and don't store Bluetooth-broadcasting valuables in it. It is not necessary to understand why the motive exists, but only to realize that some people will have it, and are not necessarily evil because of it. Deny them the opportunity, and they will not commit that particular crime.

Bait vehicles reduce the crime to merely having the motive.

[waste_monk]

>Method and opportunity are usually denied by even the least effort at security.

At what point does it become non-opportunistic to steal something? if you have to cut a rope or chain? if you have to kick in a door to get to it?

>The morality encoded into the justice system is not built for the benefit of the people typically getting sent to prisons.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, do you want a justice system where "stealing something is OK as long as it was easy to do" is a core value?

> The enforcement of property law typically tells those who have suffered "petty" property crime to fill out a report and sod off, while those who suffered "grand" property crime get the benefit of police investigation.

This is just pragmatism. Police departments have limited budgets and the community is better served by putting those resources towards more serious crimes. Monetary value of damages is an easy metric to compare the seriousness of crimes, and to prioritise the allocation of budget towards investigations accordingly.

>that person now has a reasonable motive to steal bicycles: society owes them one, and apparently does not consider it a crime worth investigating.

This is incomprehensible thinking to me. Just because you have been wronged does not give you permission to wrong others. The person who stole the bicycle owes it to the victim (or the replacement value), not society.

>If the law does not equally benefit everyone, those who benefit least are not ethically bound to obey it.

If you don't agree with a law you can campaign to get it changed, or leave the jurisdiction where that law is in effect. You do not get a free pass for breaking the law just because you don't like it.

> It is not necessary to understand why the motive exists, but only to realize that some people will have it, and are not necessarily evil because of it.

Having a motive to steal something is not the same as acting on it and actually stealing the thing. Knowingly harming others is evil, to some degree. Obviously stealing some copper is far less of a crime than committing murder, but both are wrong.

>Deny them the opportunity, and they will not commit that particular crime.

Or they'll just go look for another opportunity. Baiting criminals proactively catches people who would commit crimes regardless.

[logfromblammo]

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." --Anatole France

I understand if criminal justice reform is not one of your political issues. It's easy to ignore what happens in the system if it is not. But I encourage you to look into it. After you do, tell me that it isn't mainly a mass of unfortunates being lined up to be kicked in the head, systematically, with the genuinely bad people--who really do need to be separated from the rest of us--as a minority of the cases.

Crime is down since 1980, yet prison populations are way up. Why is that? Who are the people getting put in the prisons? Who are the people profiting from this trend?