What's amazing is how no one is honing in on the real reason this is happening, the DA's office combined with state laws make it hard to bail people and send people to prison. That's the decision made, and it's referred to as the carceral system. It's something viewed as urgently needing reform, and that's how the progressive DA's operate. Look at Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA's program (https://www.manhattanda.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Day-O...)
If cops are standing around doing nothing, it's because it's pointless to engage with a suspect physically, risking yourself while by the way people around whip out their phones to video you, if the suspect will be released on their own recognizance on some lowered charge, if the charge isn't dropped anyway.
You can also add, if you want to criticize cops, that they're civil workers at the end of the day, and most are in for the benefits, such as pension and healthcare, rather than pretending to be superheroes or vigilantes.
I wish that DA had added some references to the studies that support less incarceration. It just doesn't make sense to me, he admits that Manhattan is the worst burrough for crime, then states that it is over incarcerating. How does one determine that?
Also he mentions social programs as an alternative to incarceration, but are these programs actually available? The crime rate suggests they are not, so reducing incarceration may be counterproductive until they are better established.
>It just doesn't make sense to me, he admits that Manhattan is the worst burrough for crime, then states that it is over incarcerating. How does one determine that?
It's tied in this foundational belief (and it's mentioned as one of the points) that incarceration leads to more recidivism. How one can reach this conclusion by taking overall violent crime stats into account (also all but one out of seven felony types are up in NYC) requires some logical legwork.
The fact that increases of petty crime and increases of serious crime are both happening yearly should be a red flag that makes us question the policy decisions, which again are based on not 'over policing' or 'over incarcerating'. It could be the two are connected, but you'd be accused of Broken Windows Theory.
It's hard not to see a general chaos as being contributing. The plexiglass seems like a symbol of that to many people.
It's amazing how popular this beleif is, and how confident adherents are that it is true. It's epistemological arrogance, people simply have an unjustified confidence in social science studies.
>What do you mean by general chaos and plexiglass?
The plastic casing around goods in all the chain pharmacies now, requiring staff to unlock. There's also hired private security now on top of it. It might not be Plexiglass, to be fair.
seems like the problem is not too much incarceration, but the wrong type of incarceration (i.e. not having prison be a dangerous and dehumanizing experience). if you didn't have a broken prison system that leads to recidivism, then you could safely use incarceration as a deterrent to crime
I think you're spot on. Well designed prisons should not institutionalize people. In my mind the ideal situation would be prisons that act like adult schools that teach how to best live on the straight and narrow.
Though based on the public curriculum of my state, I'm not confident that current governments have enough talented people to make this a reality. Maybe somewhere someday.
The real reason is mentioned I the article: it’s absurdly easy to sell bulk stolen goods online. As long as that’s possible, there will always be someone stealing it, no matter how many people you lock up.
Why is it specifically a problem here in New York then, but wherever else I go in the country I don't see things nearly as locked up? Geography presumably shouldn't be a factor if shoplifters are only selling their loot online.
Population density makes it easier to hide in a crowd and also easier to recruit teams of shoplifters. The estensive subway system in Manhattan makes it easy to escape underground. Due to traffic, police response times may be longer. Manhattan has dozens of pharmacies in the business areas, which makes it easier to hit several stores in succession and get a substantial haul.
That sounds like we're pointing to an external force (the ease of selling stolen goods online), as if it were some sort of magnetic draw, an irresistible temptation.
What's tempting is that there's a lack of punishment. Do you propose we lecture to thieves to dissuade them?
It's like arguing people run red lights because they get distracted due to phone notifications and so maybe we shouldn't punish them with points that could lead to a license suspension.
> Do you propose we lecture to thieves to dissuade them?
No.
> as if it were some sort of magnetic draw, an irresistible temptation.
The shoplifting itself is committed by individuals and individual cases of shoplifting should be a reasonably light punishment. It’s not murder.
But a single person is not shoplifting $300,000 worth of merchandise. There’s two culprits: the ease of selling vast quantities of stolen items and from which follows the organized crime rings that facilitate it.
If you want to stop it, you need to crack down on both the fences (eBay, Amazon, etc.) and the organizers of these shoplifting sprees. Sure, punish the shoplifters too, but going after them won’t end it - there will always be someone in need of easy cash who can be recruited in their place.
> It's like arguing people run red lights because they get distracted due to phone notifications and so maybe we shouldn't punish them with points that could lead to a license suspension.
If bankers can get away with treble damages, then maybe shoplifters should to.
Even if you are super cynical, throwing a shoplifter in jail accomplishes what? If they have a job, they'll lose their job. If they have a home, they'll probably get evicted. They'll have to go through a court system that has to deal with this. People will have to do a bunch of work to move this person through the system.
And at the end of the day someone goes to jail a bit and leaves, and there's no safety net, so they're just permanently worse off. Congrats, you not only wasted an outsized amount of resources for petty theft, but now the person is back in society with less means of getting anything done in a legal way.
If you consider people to actually be people who you want to see improve, there's a hell of a lot better things to be done than putting people in jail for petty theft. At least in the US system.
>If bankers can get away with treble damages, then maybe shoplifters should to
What other crimes do you hold this standard with? Should rapists and murders not go to jail since bankers get away with crimes?
>Even if you are super cynical, throwing a shoplifter in jail accomplishes what?
It removes a person willing to shoplift from society.
>If they have a job, they'll lose their job. If they have a home, they'll probably get evicted. They'll have to go through a court system that has to deal with this. People will have to do a bunch of work to move this person through the system.
Same thing happens with any criminal. Why not avoid the paper work and avoid arresting murderers.
>And at the end of the day someone goes to jail a bit and leaves, and there's no safety net, so they're just permanently worse off. Congrats, you not only wasted an outsized amount of resources for petty theft, but now the person is back in society with less means of getting anything done in a legal way.
>If you consider people to actually be people who you want to see improve, there's a hell of a lot better things to be done than putting people in jail for petty theft. At least in the US system.
Perhaps this is true, but you are putting the cart before the horse. We need to fix the things you mentioned before we avoid jail time.
The fact that the only solution you see is "punishment" is exactly the problem. No reasonable punishment will stop these crimes. Period. And unreasonable punishments, like locking a human in a cage without rehabilitation for years of their life, only make the problem worse and cost us a ridiculous amount of money (and humanity).
So maybe take a step back, or five, and think about the causes of petty crimes and why they happen here more than other nations.
>The fact that the only solution you see is "punishment" is exactly the problem. No reasonable punishment will stop these crimes. Period.
Reasonableness can be debated. That these crimes are unstoppable less so; not only is any crime stoppable, if stoppable means reducing the yearly instances of it. It's disproven because the crime numbers have gone up since these policies have been implemented and we've reduced incarceration rates. It's a correlation that you can't ignore.
Your humanitarian argument is absolutely legitimate, how we deal with people who steal, often out of necessity due to addiction, mental illness, or other desperation. It's hard to say that punishment is always an inhumane option though. We can't run a society and dense cities without an enforcement of some order, since that concerns the other 99% who aren't committing these crimes. If pharmacies close and parks are unusable, everyone suffers.
A big cause of petty crimes (and more serious ones) is people growing up among criminals and seeing them not face harsh consequences. The reality experienced by a group of people shapes their mores over time.
Nah, locking them up is cheaper than leaving them out. Yes, it may cost a lot but what do you think the societal cost is of beating up CVS employees until they close another store? What do you think the neighbors would want?
> locking a human in a cage without rehabilitation for years of their life
A human who isn't worth letting out even if it were safe to do so. Net positive to society. I'd rather imprison one person than sentence another to a mugging or rape. The CVS employees have rights too.
> make the problem worse and cost us a ridiculous amount of money (and humanity)
Explain the humanity loss to someone mugged or raped by a repeat offender.
> why they happen here more than other nations
Why are more rapes reported in Sweden than India? Because more rapes happen, or more rapes are reported? In many countries if you tried to shoplift you'd simply be beaten and thrown out. In the USA police are called and a report is written.
As for which nation is safer, it depends if you're a criminal or not.
Punishment is about desert, rooted in morality. A sin/crime/misdeed just definitionally deserves punishment.
Read The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment by CS Lewis [1].
The other position is that humans need to be cured of their problems. At which point the "humanitarians" who arbitrarily decide these things, basically will endlessly torture people into conformance. They medicalize justice. With the permission of their own conscience, they will cure people of things they may not even regard as a state of disease. Of course these "diseases" are a subjective matter. What some people regard as unpleasant ways to live, others don't.
Can't even argue with someone who thinks like this. But in an ideal situation, you would get to live in a city with no prosecution for theft and I get to live somewhere with harsh punishment for theft.
The problem is I have to live under the mayors you vote for because there's a few more of you than me.
max shoplifting penalty in nyc is a year and thats for repeat offenders. its mostly fines. you are right putting people in prison for years for shoplifting is bad. it doesnt really happen
Certainly not for one offense, or even two. Someone who behaves outside the law consistently needs to be dissuaded though. What suggestions do you have?
Ideally they'd be given corporal punishment by perfectly morally upstanding cops. This is cheap, fast, doesn't stop them working and doesn't put them in an environment where they're around lots of hardened convicts.
I leave the problem of getting perfectly upstanding policemen who will not abuse their powers as an exercise to the reader.
Oh, I got this one! Just replace the cops with objective, completely fair AI! That will surely solve all of the problems and definitely hasn't been extensively worried about in science fiction for decades.
The danger is sliding the Overton window so that society becomes accepting of theft, which makes life objectively worse for everyone including the thieves.
Look at things like food deserts for an example of why allowing high theft is bad. Crime is so normal in these areas that its not even viable to bring in food in exchange for money.
You're laughably sheltered. The same person would set a baby afire to get drugs. By refusing to get them off the street at the first intervention you're setting some poor schmo up to take the fall, robbery, beating, or death.
This isn't some poor single mom who can't afford an extra $20 a month to feed her baby, stealing formula. Watch the videos - crews of five to ten are walking into a store and looting it systematically - expensive cosmetics and other non-essentials - and beating anyone who interferes. Regardless of the violence it just gets called "shoplifting" in the news.
You're minimizing organized crime that results in attempted murderer simply because the predicate crime sounds small.
Because the news doesn't report the truth. You have to watch youtube videos of the thefts to see the violence. Even then, the most egregious videos seem to be vanishing as if they're being reported. Most of these people have no idea because the news tells them it's a made-up MAGA issue or something.
And the violence is never punishable if you're a "victim". A guard who trips a thief will be charged, no question, but a thief who beats that guard on camera isn't even going to be investigated. No budget for "shoplifting" after all.
It's not like someone is stealing food. These thugs are systematically ripping off just less than $1000 of expensive cosmetics, medicine, etc, that they can sell. Some of the videos show the thieves with calculators, tabulating their take and leaving just before they cross the line.
This comes out of the pockets of the honest customers, if they weren't beaten in the robbery itself. The cost of these robberies is society itself.
Sure, negative societal costs are true of embezzlement, stock fraud, and wage theft as well. I wouldn't describe those crimes as violent either, unless by chance a separate act of violence was perpetrated in their commission. And, even though they are generally on an orders-of-magnitude higher cost scale than garden variety shoplifting, we don't normally describe embezzlers and other white collar criminals using dog whistle words like "thugs" either.
> I wouldn't describe those crimes as violent either, unless by chance a separate act of violence was perpetrated in their commission.
Or if they plan to use violence if needed. Watch the videos of them beating guards and other shoppers. It doesn't matter that they don't use violence every time because they're ready whenever they want.
If that white-collar criminal had a gun, "just in case", then we would call them a violent criminal.
> dog whistle words like "thugs" either.
Does that "I'm taking offense over here" strategy do anything for you? It just tells me you try to see everything through a race-based lens.
We have been, obviously. That's why we have the largest prison population in the world (and we have to pay for it). It just doesn't work. So if you actually care about reducing crime, and not just getting petty revenge, shouldn't we try something different finally?
Raises hand: uh, I think harshly punishing crimes works just fine. Things were pretty safe while I was growing up, in fact it was even getting safer every year. It really wasn't until we actually did "try something different" with these DAs who don't believe in prosecution and the defund movements that crime actually started to go up again.
Things are safe now, from my perspective. And from a statistical perspective, crime today is dramatically lower than the 70s and 80s. When did you grow up?
And yet the bump in property crime is coincident with noticeable recent slackening off, especially on property crime. I'm all for exploring what works, but not prosecuting shoplifters goes in the failed experiment bucket at this point IMO.
Why not both instead of relying on one? Fix the broken economy, and punish people. That should reduce crime, lower the prison population, while still punishing those who actually deserve it.
Unfortunately economy is boring and the media/congress would rather talk about stupid side issues that effect no one.
If cops are standing around doing nothing, it's because it's pointless to engage with a suspect physically, risking yourself while by the way people around whip out their phones to video you, if the suspect will be released on their own recognizance on some lowered charge, if the charge isn't dropped anyway.
You can also add, if you want to criticize cops, that they're civil workers at the end of the day, and most are in for the benefits, such as pension and healthcare, rather than pretending to be superheroes or vigilantes.