alt Hacker NewsExactly. And even worse is that crime itself is firmly rooted in politics.
Example: You work at walmart, as a cashier. You drop a $100 bill on the floor and pocket it from the till. You're caught, cops called, and you are arrested.
Example: You work as a manager at the same walmart. Store manager says labor costs are too damned high. So you go in on 10 employees, and edit their timecards to cut $100 from each of them, totaling $1000. IF you are caught, police will not respond. Instead, it is a "civil matter".
This is a bit dated chart, but its still very much correct. https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-... But notice the wage theft types are all "civil matters", and the non-eage theft are heavily criminally prosecuted. And who does those? Predominantly poorer people.
We also see this with dumping trash, being criminal and severe to the individual, but companies (read: Musk) can dump thousands of gallons of toxic sludge per day. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/inspection-texas-drainag...
We also see criminality differences between charges of freebase cocaine versus crack cocaine. Crack was what black people smoked, so sentencing was like 10x of freebase.
When you start looking at how laws are apllied, its almost always the same pattern: those at the top are a civil matter. Those who report to the top are a criminal matter. Those at the bottom are "charged with the fullest maximum punishment".
Right. Though I want to focus on a specific aspect of your hypothetical (which is essentially real):
If the manager hadn't stolen $100 from the cashier, there would have been a MUCH weaker incentive for the cashier to steal themselves.
This is the crux around which everything else turns: we are effectively post-scarcity, as far as production is concerned. As a society, we purposely create theft, and debt, and the associated desperation and crime, as a matter of policy. As a choice.
If you were eradicate wage theft, you would essentially eradicate the internal logic of street theft, in the vast majority of cases. We could just... not have theft. But by not prosecuting wage theft, we, as a society, have decided that we condone and even need theft.