alt Hacker NewsFor violent crime sure. But for theft if you can just consistently recover the loss + a penalty it will do so much more to discourage it than simply raising the penalty.
For violent crime sure. But for theft if you can just consistently recover the loss + a penalty it will do so much more to discourage it than simply raising the penalty.
That's for theft specifically. Most thefts are committed by repeat offenders.
You are making a very common mistake of assuming that criminals are prone to making good decisions.
If they were, they probably wouldn't offend the first time. And almost certainly wouldn't reoffend - once the costs of getting caught are clear to them.
"Consistently" is not very realistic without a way of making repeat offenders stop reoffending. You need the level of law enforcement to completely overpower the crime rate - and that means either getting better funded, better staffed, better equipped, more professional enforcement, or lowering crime rates. "We need to overfund the police" is expensive and unpopular, "we need to give the police more surveillance powers" is extremely unpopular, and there are very few ways of getting lower crime rates. Jail bars, however, are a proven one.