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Comment by jvuygbbkuurx

1 day ago

It's actually solved by putting thieves in prison (by the help of flock cameras).

Prisons are full. We have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. No cops, prosecutors, or judges are interested in putting a bike thief in prison. We've just decided it's an acceptable cost in our society. It's another reason that cycling is not a useable mode of transport in many places: if you don't have a secure/indoor place to put your bike at work or while shopping, it will get stolen. So you either ride bikes that you can afford to lose, which sucks if you have to go any real distance, or you drive.

Is it though? Does prison work as a deterrence to others?

  • There's usually a fairly small number of criminals in the population and they have short careers. Otherwise, the whole enterprise of society wouldn't be viable.

    So once you take them off the streets for a couple of years, or decades for the more hardened ones, it's fine. It has an added benefit of breaking criminal networks so the future adepts have no place to fence the stolen goods.

    • Do you have any kind of education in this area? Because that doesn’t sound like the little that I’ve read about sociology and psychology.

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    • "It has an added benefit of breaking criminal networks so the future adepts have no place to fence the stolen goods" is probably the most naive thing I've ever heard.

      I also think you have no idea how much it costs per prisoner per year.

      I also think you have no idea how much harder it is for someone to get a job, housing, a partner, etc after they have a conviction. Or how much whatever life they had falls apart, which includes partners, friends, family. And guess what happens when you strip away all of someone's social connections? They lose that safety net, and are now dependent upon whatever society as whole provides. And in the US we have people saying "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" non-ironically, not realizing the whole fucking point of that phrase is that recovering from poverty in the US is extremely difficult.

      That money is better spent on helping people who are not able to afford basic necessities, because that is why a lot of people commit property crime.

      I suggest you actually open up some studies on this subject because you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Or just open up a chart reflecting the economy over the decades and compare it with property crime rates.

      The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world by both headcount and percentage of the population. How's that working for us? We have one of the higher property and violent crime rates among developed nations. Far higher than nations where criminals are imprisoned for rehabilitation, not to punish. Things like giving them a cell that looks like a bedroom, not pen in an animal shelter.

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Where I live that’s a win win for thieves. Earn money stealing a bike, have a roof over your head and free food.

Police here don’t even care to help if your car is stolen and you have GPS on it. Cameras and jail do nothing to help protect your property if the police refuse to work.

  • "here"? We don't know where you are.

    In the UK police will ask the value of the property stolen and use that to decide whether to do anything. Low-value is under a few £k.

Aside from the fact that there's little to no actual evidence (not funded by flock cherry-picking, and doing a lot of extremely thin correlation/causation nonsense...

No, it's actually solved by providing social safety net programs and managing the economy to have entry level accessible jobs that pay a living wage. People steal because they run out of other options. The cost of flock contracts would be far better spent on food pantries, job counseling, emergency housing...

There is nearly zero correlation between the number of police and the amount of crime.