[mortov]

Spoken like a true American ! After all, if stealing a king size snickers bar deserves 16 years (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/040700-01.htm), stealing a bicycle needs some serious deterrent sentencing. Sure, he was a recidivist and had previously stolen some Oreo cookies too !

Or, it's a bicycle - keep things in proportion. Sure it sucks to have stuff stolen (I've been a victim too) but crazy disproportionate sentencing has made criminal justice in the US just insane.

Your proposal sounds great, just like all the other get tough on crime initiatives over the past 40 odd years but it has left the US with what looks like the craziest most vengeful 'justice' system outside of the Sharia introduced by ISIS.

It's all great until you happen to fall foul of these get tough initiatives - see lots of previous HN stories for examples.

[jzwinck]

I don't live in America. When I did, I felt more similar to how you do now. Today I live somewhere with harsh penalties for crimes, and the effects are very visible. You can leave your smartphone on a table while you go buy food and no one will take it. People lock up pretty decent bikes with simple cable locks. Peace of mind is worth something; protecting people who steal is not helping anyone.

I thought this would be obvious, but I am not arguing for 16 year sentences for stealing food. Food theft is one thing for which the penalty is a real conundrum (maybe the guy was really hungry).

[_delirium]

I can believe there are places that happen to have both harsh penalties and low crime rates, but I'm more skeptical of a general relationship. I believe studies in the U.S. have found that varying probability of punishment significantly varies deterrence (people aren't deterred if they believe they have a low chance of being caught), but that revising sentence levels upwards or downwards has virtually no effect.

As long as we're trading anecdotes, I live somewhere with very lenient penalties for crimes and what you describe is also true here. People typically don't even bother with a cable lock, they just use an O-lock [1] that locks the rear wheel to itself, whose main purpose is to make it inconvenient to ride off with the bike.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_city_bike#O-lock