[tshaddox]

Isn’t the most obvious response from economics that the crime needs to be made more expensive? In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher.

If a quarter of the people who tried a comparable theft got thrown in jail for 2 years and another quarter got shot by a security guard, I suspect attempts would be rare.

The financial damage done by the thief is presumably irrelevant to the thief, beyond the fact that sentencing is probably stricter for bigger thefts.

[jmward01]

I highly doubt the people doing this look at crime and punishment stats before they do this. More punishment often just ends up costing society because courts and incarceration aren't cheap and no real rehabilitation so it often just makes the person do more bad things when they get out. I'm not saying 'no jail', but we do need evidence based criminal justice.

[tshaddox]

I don’t think potential criminals need to research statistics to have a general sense of the ROI of attempting the crime. They probably have a ballpark sense of both the cash value of the stolen property and the likelihood of getting caught.

[alpinisme]

Yes but those are very different time scales of consequence. Definite immediate reward or possible long term consequence. People with active drug addictions are known to vastly overprioritize the former to the detriment of the latter. I mean, they also know the risks of overdose but they’re not all getting testing kits for their drugs.

[toast0]

They probably didn't independently come up with the idea to steal cables or catalytic converters either.

It's all word of mouth. But if half your buddies get shot [1] or jailed when they steal cables for drugs, it probably doesn't seem like such a good idea.

Same thing when your buddy finally fills their trailer full of cats and brings them to the scrap yard to find out they can't get anything from that anymore. Unfortunately, there's a lag, but afaik, cat thefts drop pretty reliably after they become economically useless... not all the way to zero, some people don't get the news very fast.

[1] this is not an endorsement of lethal force to deter cable theft

[47282847]

Criminal punishment research consistently shows that reality does not follow initial intuition here.

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...

"Unfortunately, so far, the existing empirical work has not had a central place in policy, legislation, and political discourse.”

(“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result”)

[swiftcoder]

> In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher

Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating probabilities. They'll buy lottery tickets at 1:300,000,000 odds, and are upset when an 85% shot in XCOM misses...

The likelihood of being harmed would need to be basically 100% before folks would stop taking the risk.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

> The likelihood of being harmed would need to be basically 100% before folks would stop taking the risk.

Your terms are acceptable.

In all seriousness, there are cultures in the middle east that do (or did) this sort of thing. Losing a hand for stealing, etc.

[kelnos]

That's not a 100% probability of being harmed, though. That's only if you get caught. Most criminals believe they won't get caught.

[cjbgkagh]

They are less likely to reoffend if harmed, most crimes are done by repeat offenders.

[swiftcoder]

> They are less likely to reoffend if harmed, most crimes are done by repeat offenders.

Since most current-day legal systems severely limit employment opportunities for former criminals, it's pretty hard to determine whether they would re-offend in a society that didn't inflict continual punishment in this way

[cjbgkagh]

It’s not that hard to know, since they’re often not caught on their first crime but on their Nth. They leave fingerprints that’ll link the crimes together, so we already have stats on how likely a person will reoffend even when they are not punished at all.

Criminal behavior is strongly linked to IQ and like IQ is largely hereditary. It’s dumb people thinking they’ve figured out a trick to game the system.

We have a labor glut which is the primary reason employment opportunities are so restricted for offenders, I think it’s unhealthy for society to keep importing so many people in these circumstances. I also think allowing so much violence in prisons, effectively pressuring people to join gangs, is extremely counterproductive.

[close04]

That just leads either to disproportionate or cruel and unusual punishment (not every object has the inherent level of danger so your $200 property must be rigged to kill or severely injure on attempted theft), or to raising stakes where the criminal is willing to do much worse since the outcome could anyway be death or severely body harm.

If getting shot for $1000 is on the table, might as well come with a gun and shoot first, and topple the whole tower while at it.

When you punish a baggie of drugs with 20 years in prison or potentially getting shot dead in the street, drug dealers escalate to containers of drugs. Where are you going to escalate the punishment? For those who feel like they get nothing from society no punishment works effectively, they are already in a prison with no future.

[hiddencost]

There's another theory which says that if people have health care, food, shelter, education, and liberty, they won't commit crimes like this. Just a thought.

[alexgieg]

Those are pre-requisites, but not enough.

You also need society to have local cultures, as well as the culture at large, that actively oppose such behavior as immoral and/or shameful, with enforcement by peers. This I say based on two well-proven models, the sociological typology of societies as guilt, shame, or fear-based, and the psychological model of the six stages (level of complexity) of moral reasoning, that shows that up to 85% of the adult population worldwide derive their values from group-affiliation.

Atop that, individuals themselves need hope in the future, meaning the perspective of improving upon the baseline that those pre-requisites provide, since a baseline is emotionally neutral. The perspective of remaining at exactly that same baseline year after year after decade isn't sufficient.

With all of the above provided, petty crime is minimized to the point only people with severe personality disorders commit them. There's no way to fix this, but it becomes so low we're now talking of Japan levels of per-capita crimes, if not less.

[devmor]

Japan, the society with such a corrupt criminal justice system that being arrested for anything regardless of guilt is generally considered the end of your prospects in life?

[kelnos]

Both things can be true, that Japan's criminal justice system is awful, and that Japanese people have a strong culture of respect for the commons and community.

[devmor]

Yes, not only are both true, but one is the consequence of the other's extreme.

When you socially punish people for sticking out, even harmlessly, eventually you end up criminally punishing people for sticking out, even harmlessly.

[rdbl27]

You are glossing over the fact that Japan severely punishes crime, and acquittals are almost unheard of.

[jeffrallen]

It's not a theory. It's socialism and it works fine in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and a bunch of other places.

[johanvts]

Im Danish, and I approve of the welfare state system, but we still have people cutting down EV charger cables etc here.

[tadfisher]

The answer is, you still do socialism, and you also pay someone to go around busting scrap yards that buy obviously-stolen material.

Just focusing on the demand-side dramatically reduced incidences of catalytic converter theft in the US. You still get the occasional attempt, but basically no scrap yard will take catalytic converters without a title to the vehicle with matching VIN, and most will want to see the vehicle.

Yes, requiring paperwork to scrap wiring is bureaucracy manifest. But legitimate people just do not roll up to scrap yards with a van full of tangled 4/0.

The big catalytic converter buyer was so brazen, he had a mobile app. Free markets for stolen scrap is just beyond tolerable at this point.

[ithkuil]

Italy is no Denmark but you still require to register before selling you scrap copper.

I think it's a reasonable response for a real problem and refusing to do this due to some idealistic free market principle appears to me to be a sign of fanaticism.

[apelapan]

Scandinavian scrap metal thieves organize trucks and cranes to steal copper roofs from old churches and rip down railroad overhead lines all the time.

Free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing and social safety nets make little difference.

Some people will stop at nothing to get more, no matter how much they already have. (Applies to billionaires and paupers alike). I guess you could call it having an entrepreneurial spirit.

No one steals car stereos anymore though, because you can't sell them to anyone. That mechanism could be put to more work. Heavy, EU-wide supervision and enforcement against scrap metal dealers would probably make a difference.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

The replies to you illustrate this is provably false. Socialism has yet to work anywhere it's tried.

[intended]

Nope.

The surest disincentive is knowing you will be caught, not the penalty.

If you can get away with it, then what value the penalty?

[kelnos]

The data doesn't agree with you, as others in this subthread have noted with references.

[intended]

I saw only one submission to a paper, would you be willing to share links to the other references you mention?

[kelnos]

Economics is a bad place to look for a fix for social problems.

Look at incentives, instead: housed, well-fed people with financial security and a feeling of purpose in life tend to commit fewer crimes, so let's fix wealth/income inequality, as well as our pathetic social safety net.

Not saying that will fix everything. People still commit crimes, both rich and poor alike, because they want a shortcut to having more than they have. But eliminating desperation would certainly help.