[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