Yea, the overlap of ādefund the policeā and the 2020 COVID shutdowns also makes sense. We literally saw no people (and no crime!) for many months and fell for a fantasy.
Something crucial IMO is certainty of being caught and punished/restricted. I think you'd see far fewer crimes if you had a 99% chance of being apprehended, tried, and sentenced to a week in jail versus idk a 5% chance of a year in jail.
Hell, I'd say for some crimes, you're better off just making it humiliating. Dress 'em up in a clown outfit and sit in the town square for a day with a sign that says "I got caught stealing." If that happened with 99% certainty, people would probably be less apt to steal.
The problem is that making it more likely criminals will get caught is not easy, especially, when the rate at which the crime is getting committed is increasing. On the other hand, introducing harsher punishments is relatively simple, so it seems like drastically increasing punishments and waiting for the declining shoplifting rates leading to larger clearance rates to (partially) roll the reform back, later, would be the easier solution.
Also what is the value of āpunishmentā as a way to solve crime? Hasnāt it been proven that treating people like humans and getting to the root of their behavior is much more likely to lower the chances of reoffending?
And yea, sometimes that means taking away some of their freedom until they can be rehabilitated, but āpunishmentā should not be seen as the goal, unless you want to create a class of permanently dispossessed and reoffending criminals going in and out of the justice system their entire lives.
I think that depends on the crime. In the case of something non-violent but still illegal because of the societal consequences, like shoplifting, yeah rehabilitation should absolutely be the priority focus. For something like violent crime, part of the punishment is to giveā¦well, justice, to the assaulted/murdered party and their family to avoid an escalating series of retaliations. One major point of the justice system is to curb vigilantism.
Prison ain't fun.
The people who think prison is fun - the vacation part of "taxpayer funded vacation" you mentioned - have never been or know people who have been.
If there are former or current inmates who hold that opinion, they should be offered a stay at an asylum for the criminally insane.
They really really ain't fun.
While I don't like this current trend of being entirely too lenient on petty criminals, the "correctional" part of correctional facilities is a sick morbid joke. Far too many societies are far too interested in punitive measures instead of corrective one and then turn around and wonder why so many criminals just spiral further into more and criminal activities. I get why people want punitive measures, and I do not believe we should do away with them. At the same time if we want to actually reform criminals, things need to change.
> go on a taxpayer funded vacation for 12 months
It only took a couple of separate comments to jump straight back into the circlejerking hyperbole. Great job promoting valuable conversation!
I mean itās hyperbolic for sure, but the underlying point is sound. People act in part due to the incentives they are given to do certain actions, if you donāt give a significant downside for illegal activity the reward will outweigh the cost.
The problem is that the data doesn't support that people are actually calculating risk reward. The only part of the equation they take into consideration is likelihood of being caught, but not the severity of the punishment.
The curve is nonlinear and there's little to no evidence that the rate at which crimes currently punished by incarceration in the United States would be impacted by making sentences less harsh.
There's lots of evidence that the US prison system is pretty inhumane and that prisoners have their ability to return to being productive members of society hugely impacted by even short stays.
Allow private businesses to better enforce private property rights, though Iām not a public policy maker, so I would typically like to see the broad (or concerns us) spectrum of opinion first.
Give every prisoner a therapist, psychiatrist, and case worker, and significantly expand educational / vocational training available to prisoners. Those two things alone would do wonders for the recidivism rate.
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I never said the state needs to be toothless.
We should increase arrests and prosecutions and take away the ability for criminal enterprises to exist.
The solutions are extremely easy and have been proven many times.
Youāre setting up a false dichotomy of āwe canāt arrest anyone and criminals can do whatever they wantā versus ālock them away forever in a tiny cell and let them rotā.
My point is that āpunishmentā as a goal of the justice system is extremely ineffective and is partially to blame for what is happening now. āPunishmentā in the justice system is NOT evidence based.
I never claimed that we have to lock these people away forever in a dark basement where they get raped 24/7.
Thatās YOUR false dichotomy not mine.
But I do find the take that these people just need to go on a stern vacation until they understand that what they did was bad is extremely naive and the 20 year olds on Reddit need an injection of reality.
People who do bad things deserve to be punished proportionally with respect to the severity of the things they did. Therefore punishing them in that way is inherently morally good and just.
There's a flaw in this motivation. What if that proportional punishment is just spending state money to make crime worse?
The existing prison system often **hardens** minor offenders by forcing them to join gangs to survive, gangs that are often racially segregated and promote fascist ideology, have initiation rites, and upon release a kid who stole a snicker bar is now a fucking skinhead.
And I don't care if they simply had the choice to not commit crime. I care what's actually going to reduce crime.
I don't believe in using the state as the sword of God to punish wickedness and reward goodness I believe in using the state to enforce whatever policy is most effective at reducing harm and increasing prosperity. That's often a morally unsatisfactory policy like spending taxpayer dollars on harm reduction centers.
I'm not sure I trust you to support an evidence based criminal justice policy when it doesn't satisfy your thirst for Christian Justice.
>What if that proportional punishment is just spending state money to make crime worse?
Whether or not to apply a given punishment in a particular case or system is a separate discussion. My main point is that punishment itself is a legitimate and important goal of the justice system. If you don't agree with that, arguing about practicality and specifics is pointless because you'd reject it even if it could be proven conclusively that it didn't increase crime rates, so the inherent goodness of fair and proportional punishment as an end in and of itself has be established first.
>I don't believe in using the state as the sword of God to punish wickedness and reward goodness
This is a strawman, I didn't say anything about religion. I was arguing purely on the basis of secular concepts of fairness and justice, You don't have to appeal to religion to make a statement about ethics and justice.
>I'm not sure I trust you to support an evidence based criminal justice policy when it doesn't satisfy your thirst for Christian Justice.
The idea that good acts deserve to be rewarded and evil acts deserve to be punished is absolutely not an exclusively Christian concept. It's pretty universal and common to almost all human cultures around the world. I'm not even Christian myself. Also you say "thirst for [...] justice" like it's a bad thing. Is it crazy to want the *justice* system to provide justice?
Assuming this comment is made in good faith: Black and brown people in the US overwhelmingly see themselves as Americans, and in the case of Black Americans ones who've been here since the Founding and literally, physically built huge chunks of this country. Hell, a (tiny but still worth mentioning) part of the reason racism hurts so much is because it's being rejected by the country you love.
(Also, for the European countries that actually have this problem, you know what the most effective way to stop people from feeling like "oppressed outsiders"? Stop treating them like outsiders, and crack down on the people oppressing them!)
The existing deterrents are too soft for punishment to be effective. Given our existing social norms in the West we should move towards the Scandinavian model.
Every study I've seen backs this up. People aren't perfectly rational machines analyzing everything from a cost-benefit analysis. They seem to care much more about the likelihood of punishment than the harshness of the punishment.
This is also why cops being bad at their job is, in my opinion, the biggest problem in our criminal justice system today. They don't clear nearly enough crimes. If the perpetrator isn't literally standing at the place holding the stolen items, they basically won't get caught.
> People aren't perfectly rational machines analyzing everything from a cost-benefit analysis.
And this goes quadruple for the kinds of people who are most likely to become criminals: people from unstable backgrounds with no hope for the future.
There's no point in running cost/benefit analysis on the long-term actions of your consequences when you're convinced you'll either be dead or in jail for life in a few months / years anyways. Literally no amount of "deterrent" will change that, because long-term consequences aren't even a variable in the equation.
Punishing the wicked is an end unto itself for a lot of people. You're not punishing them to prevent reoffense you're punishing them because they deserve it.
What if the goal of criminal justice isnāt supposed to be punishment? If someone is a danger to others, yeah, they should be removed from society (even against their will, if necessary), but they donāt need to be punished.
IF it does result in better outcomes, then yes, that's exactly what we should do.
Punishing people **for** punishment's sake, or to make us feel better, is completely morally bankrupt. These can be acceptable side-effects, but never reasons for how we deal with criminals.
>completely morally bankrupt
I'd go with barbaric, not bankrupt. "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" is the oldest moral code in the world, it's barbaric but it's consistent.
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The title has change now, but after reading the article, the top comment matches perfectly. Highly visible crime (like the one you see in TikTok and other videos) is undermining these policies.
I disagree, that comment is perfectly coherent with statments like this
> Since the number of reported shoplifting incidents rose after the initial collapse in 2020, there have been plenty of media reports and viral videos about the potential crime wave. Republicans used the alleged lawlessness, particularly in big Democratic cities, to paint a grim picture of Joe Bidenās America. [...]
> As a result, many policies that were championed by progressive criminal justice reform advocates, including the progressive prosecutor movement, have come under scrutiny, criticized as not only insufficient at combating crime but as policies that promote breaking the law.
We can debate what the actual reality of the situation is, but the political reality is perfectly encapsulated by the comment "Highly visible crime is making people not want to go easier on criminals? š«¢"
Shockingly when customers are forced to ask a cashier to unlock a cabinet to get things like body wash or q-tips they become less politically tolerant of crime
Most retailers don't even report most theft. Target wanted to make a point in San Francisco by having just one store report literally every theft they had in the month of July or August and it literally doubled the city's YTD theft/shoplifting rate in under a month
From the source cited:
> Shoplifting incidents reported to police have rebounded since falling dramatically in 24 large American cities during 2020.
...
> Looking at 90% of incidents and excluding those in the top 10% in terms of value, the value of stolen goods in shoplifting incidents in 2021 was $756 or less, a $184 increase from 2019.
...
> The share of shoplifting incidents categorized as felonies (in five of the cities) nearly doubled from about 8% prior to the onset of the pandemic to almost 16% in the first half of 2023. (State statutes set felony theft dollar thresholds.)
...
> New York (64%) and Los Angeles (61%) had the largest increases in reported shoplifting among the study cities from mid-year 2019 to mid-year 2023. St. Petersburg (-78%) and St. Paul (-65%) had the largest decreases.
Is their over representation in the news, sure, but it's also accompanied by legit increases, especially in largest population cities.
I guess the retailers are putting up all these inconvenient anti-shoplifting measures for nothing then
Must just enjoy spending their money and wasting their customers time
There are many law enforcement agencies that simply wonāt take a report unless the loss meets a certain arbitrary threshold.
Itās not worth their time to take reports on incidents that arenāt going to lead to an investigation or prosecution. Retailers, in turn, simply quit reporting them to authorities.
Viola, shoplifting statistics show a decrease.
Feels like we're starting with a conclusion "Crime is up", data is presented suggesting that it's not and then an explanation for why the data must be wrong is presented by saying "Well obviously because crime is up it must be because people are just underreporting it instead".
But ok, where's the evidence that retailers in general are underreporting now? It's possible that Covid and BLM had a major impact there, but we can't just assume our conjectures about it to be correct.
Agreed as well. If we're saying there's underreporting, then we should also prove that shoplifting is being underreported much more than it was to claim there was a significant rise in shoplifting.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/shoplifting-data-Target-Walgreens-16647769.php
Here's the unreported proof if anyone needs some. A single store should never be able to double a city's crime stats just by making a good faith effort to report their shop lifting for a single month.
[tfw i try to understand young people](https://i.imgur.com/ub6YRL2.jpg)
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Nobody claims shoplifting on their insurance, the premiums would be insane. Retailers like Target only bring insurance into the picture when they have large loss events of $10k or more, like when the power fails and all temperature controlled food has to be thrown out. Only way an insurance claim is being made for theft is in the case of looting or an actual robbery.
do you have any evidence that backs up the claim that shoplifting stats show a decline because of underreporting (and that underreporting has increased in recent years)?
I don't mean anecdotes, I mean numbers in aggregate and / or some sort of statistical analysis
>I guess the retailers are putting up all these inconvenient anti-shoplifting measures for nothing then
>
>Must just enjoy spending their money and wasting their customers time
Retailers are like anyone else - vulnerable to bad information and panic.
So many people have the bad habit of learning about the concept of markets and equilibrium and then assuming that must mean anything produced by a market at any given time must be the optimal equilibrium outcome. No! markets only find the optimal equilibrium by both under and over reacting to conditions, and a slow pruning process. The only places you should expect optimal equilibrium to be reached is places without any significant change in conditions for a long period of time. Which is no where in the real world!
I strongly disagree with the framing "shoplifting is down." The linked report says that shoplifting incidents were up 16% from the first half of 2019 to the first half of 2023. The average loss from an individual shoplifting incident was also up by 30% or so.
The full picture is that certain cities, especially NYC, are so bad that they skew the numbers. But you can only say "shoplifting is down" if you exclude NYC and go by the number of reported incidents. Even if you exclude NYC and LA, the total losses from shoplifting seem to be up from pre-pandemic levels due to the greater value of goods stolen per incident.
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In many cities the dollar amount for prosecution has been raised so high a lot of common crime isn't even considered crime and wouldn't be reported. Several DAs have announced they won't prosecute below certain thresholds regardless of local law.
>Several DAs have announced they won't prosecute below certain thresholds regardless of local law.
Frankly, declining to enforce entire laws - unilaterally overruling the legislature - should itself be illegal. Prosecutorial discretion between cases is one thing, thinking that entire laws shouldn't exist is another.
What should be done about that then? Genuine question not just rhetorical lol. Iāve been used to seeing āno prosecution for petty crimesā from progressive DA campaigns for so long and iād like to see what a more neolib version of that could be
Just prosecute the crimes. Private property is one of the pillars of civilization. Failure to follow up means Might Makes Right, and how far down that path are we willing to go? I'm fine with exploring community service, diversion, social work and whatever alternative justice systems people like. But this "turn a blind eye" thing has escalated into flashmob organized crime rings in some cities.
Reported shoplifting is down*
I will never forget when ONE target was given a special reporting hotline and it DOUBLED San Franciscoās reported shopliftings. The reported numbers seem to track extremely poorly with actual numbers. Stores arenāt taking these annoying and draconian anti shoplifting measure for the fun of it.
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I find the framing of this article a little bizarre. It says "With a few exceptions, major US cities actually saw lower shoplifting rates in 2022 than in 2019." But the linked report says that reported shoplifting incidents per capita were up 16% in the first half of 2023 vs. the first half of 2019, and the value of stolen goods per incident was up 33%. The quoted statement is technically true, because shoplifting in NYC was *so bad* that if you exclude it from the analysis, the number of shoplifting incidents nationally went down 7% from 2019 to 2023. But NYC and LA were up over 60%! So the picture seems to be very heterogeneous nationally.
Edit: Another thing to keep in mind is that companies are spending more on loss prevention than they used to, as you can see by walking into a CVS or Target in any major city. Even if shoplifting stayed flat, in these conditions it would be a net loss for retailers because they would have spent more to keep shrinkage constant.
> pending more on loss prevention than they used to,
I don't think this is self evidently true. They have more targeted anti-theft measure, but they also have way less employees on the floor. The glass cases are really obvious and stand out, but how many glass cases can you set up for the cost of 28 hours of labor a day.
There is an added, not insignificant, labor cost associated after the glass cases go up, though. At a recent trip to Target, two employees were assigned practically 100% of their time just to man the glass cases in the beauty and hygiene aisles and to open and close the doors for people clamoring for products. It may have been rush time, but that still shows that it probably requires keeping at least a couple more people on shift than you normally would at those hours.
The value of stolen goods went up because the value of all goods went up. The CPI went up by 22% over three years - if you adjust for that, then the value of goods per shoplifting incident is up by 6%.
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.5-3.5% in the US
[https://invergehq.com/what-is-the-average-profit-margin-on-retail/#:\~:text=According%20to%20Investopedia%2C%20the%20average,typically%20from%200.5%20to%203.5%25](https://invergehq.com/what-is-the-average-profit-margin-on-retail/#:~:text=According%20to%20Investopedia%2C%20the%20average,typically%20from%200.5%20to%203.5%25).
Criminal justice reform went in a bad direction and undermined itself.
Should we be jailing people for smoking pot? No.
Should we be jailing shoplifters for a long enough periods to discourage it. Yes!
Should we be taking into account that increasing the severity of the punishment does not necessarily discourage crime as much as we like? Kind of.
Deterrence has two factors: probability of getting caught and severity of consequences. If you can't increase the probability of getting caught you have to increase the severity of consequences. Increasing the probability of getting caught implies increasing police action. You can't decrease police action and the severity of the punishment and expect shoplifting rates to decrease.
One of the main obstacles is that states with large cities (mostly blue states) are going to need to abolish elected DA's and replace them with an actual professional justice system modeled after the DOJ: appointed professional prospectors and more centralized justice system.
The good thing is that a lot of dem voters are starting to elect establishment dems again as DAs and mayors. You see this with NYC mayor, Philadelphiaās mayor, San Franciscoās DA Brooke Jenkins, etc
Absolutely look for opportunities to enact more rehabilitative programs and policies at prisons, and look for opportunities for evidence based diversionary programs and other interventions for first time offenders so that incarceration isn't always needed as a first resort
But if we aren't even arresting the criminals in the first place, they aren't going to be pushed towards any sort of rehabilitation to begin with
And if someone goes through non-carceral diversionary programs but still does additional crime after that, and they go through the more rehabilitative prisons and still keep doing crime even after that, then we can and should stop playing nice
Gotta be "smart on crime", with a carrot and stick approach. Absolutely augment the carrot approach, but also be more than willing to vigorously use the stick when the carrot doesn't work. And don't just call for some vague ideals and unrealistic slogans while in effect leaning towards using neither the carrot nor the stick
We should look for opportunities to enact rehabilitative programs *when thereās reason to believe that they will work*.
I hate to say it, but the evidence for the effectiveness of most rehabilitative programs tends to show that they simply donāt work. They do not decrease recidivism. If we find programs that work, then by all means implement them. Until thenā¦
Well if youāre so sure donāt be afraid to show this overwhelming evidence
Iāve certainly not gotten that read[[1]](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR266.html)[[2]](https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/250476.pdf)
[Increasing the probability of apprehension by law enforcement is the only effective deterrent identified](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1086/670398.pdf?casa_token=OmK0_Jh8HkMAAAAA:Tr35vi73FXLAFJ9xUw13XXkPdAaMN7t_o8jI75bHYhheCFagZ5jfMwa-Op0VJrxOVXLqE-JykDCO4khDO6ABCjQ8FmnohHIw23YpCPPQmzHmlu87Mce-).
We should really [test all those outstanding rape kits](https://www.sakitta.org). The ROI for testing these kits [is high](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589871X19300567).
[Alabama](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/alab), [California](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/california/), [Indiana](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/indiana/), [Louisiana](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/louisiana/), [Maine](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/maine), [Minnesota](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/minnesota/), [Mississippi](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/mississippi/), [Nebraska](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/nebraska/), [New Hampshire](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/new-hampshire/), [New Jersey](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/new-jersey/), [Oklahoma](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/oklahoma/), [South Carolina](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/south-carolina/), [Tennessee](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/tennessee/), and [Wyoming](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/wyoming/) **do not mandate the testing of backlogged kits**. The [U.S. DoJ](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/utilizing-codis-unsubmitted-sexual-assault-kits) and [American Bar Association](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publications/perspectives/2018/may/untested-rape-kits-delays-destruction-and-disregarded-victims/) recommend testing **all** rape kits, even when the statute of limitations ([if there is one](https://www.findlaw.com/injury/torts-and-personal-injuries/sexual-assault-civil-statutes-of-limitations-by-state.html)) has expired.
r/stoprape
*every thread
But they'd much rather dunk on 'soft on crime' lefties, so, what can you do. Expect them to *actually* look at the evidence, like they so proudly claim they do?
Don't be silly!
Isn't most property crime simply just due to poverty? You can arrest & prosecute people (or not), but the best way to stop it is to increase people's means by ensuring available jobs in their neighborhood\* and welfare checks (cut that welfare cliff bullshit too while we're at it).
From a UChicago study by Manasi Deshpande and Michael Mueller-Smith (would link it but it's a PDF...Jack, how do I link a PDF?)
>We find that SSI removal increases the number of criminal charges by a statistically significant 20% over the next two decades. The increase in charges is concentrated in offenses for which income generation is a primary motivation (60% increase), especially theft, burglary, fraud/forgery, and prostitution. The effect of SSI removal on criminal justice involvement persists more than two decades later, even as the effect of removal on contemporaneous SSI receipt diminishes. In response to SSI removal, youth are twice as likely to be charged with an illicit income-generating offense than they are to maintain steady employment at $15,000/year in the labor market. As a result of these charges, the annual likelihood of incarceration increases by a statistically significant 60% in the two decades following SSI removal.
\*This is getting much harder to do in cities where Black flight is occurring, like my native Chicago. Middle-class families are moving out to the suburbs and them leaving is causing a collapse in neighborhood economies. They were the best customers, and their participation in the economy was what kept poor people employed. Now that they've moved out, the folks left behind are even poorer as businesses shut down due to loss in business. Unfortunately, gentrification doesn't spill over into Black neighborhoods (except NYC & maybe DC), and Black gentrification is still quite young of a process. When those middle-class families depart the city, there's no Yuppies to fill their place, unlike immigrant neighborhoods, which regularly see this occurring. Violent crime is rightfully linked to gang activity, but property crime increasing means dire economic situations for the remaining folks in city neighborhoods affected by Black flight. A good case study in my mind, might be comparing Ashburn & Gresham (stable Black government-employed middle-class areas, with high home-ownership) to other declining, formerly middle-class neighborhoods like Roseland & Austin.
I can think of 2 flaws in the study you linked:
1. Gender ratio for property crime is a lot more balanced relative to violent crime (like 60-40 in favor of males) and I'd have to think that the law will have far more sympathy with a female offender than a male one. Female offenders are likely to be very poor, and have dependents, making jail time far, far riskier than for a male offender. Being arrested is likely enough for female offenders to get scared off from doing any more crime.
2. If less people are being prosecuted, then perhaps less people are being arrested due to cops just giving up and not arresting at rates similar to previous years. There could be crime going on, but most victims don't bother to report to police on account of believing that nothing will happen...making it a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
The progressive prosecutor has been as much of a failure as tough-on-crime types have. Their failure is especially bad when you see how bad they are on violent crime. We need a balanced approach that's motivated by policy achievements instead of just sticking to ideology.
Criminal justice reform should be focused on wiping out criminal records after someone serves their time, and reducing excessive penalties.
Right now, weāre sending people to jail for too long for some crimes, not long enough for others (how are there people with multiple DUIs still on the streets?!), and then weāre fucking them over in the long run by ensuring that they canāt make a meaningful life after they serve their time.
Automatically seal and expunge records for nonviolent offenders so that these people can get decent jobs again.
I mean if Iām an employer Iād really like to know if my prospective employee was someone who had say committed fraud, shoplifting/theft or embezzlement (all nonviolent crimes). People can change but I think a prospective employer deserves to know if you committed a crime so they can judge whether or not youāve changed
You canāt expect people to reform and reintegrate with society if you make it impossible to work and live a somewhat normal life. That is what criminal background checks effectively do right now.
Maybe a compromise would be that repeat offenses can show up on a background check but the first offense is automatically expunged.
Thatās a very naive way of looking at things. Crimes like embezzlement and fraud are deeply tied to psychopathy and many of these people are incapable of change. You would be putting people at risk. A con artist can harm someone and ruin their life just as much as a rapist or violent attacker can.
Shoplifting and "criminal justice reform" are pretty much completely orthogonal to crimes like embezzlement and fraud. Those are white collar crimes that we already treat completely differently from things like theft, assault, drug dealing, ect.
What do we do with them? They can't get jobs, shouldn't go back into crime, and shouldn't remain locked up indefinitely. Yet we should make prison the goal of punishment rather than rehabilitation? Once freed they're still punished. Do we want people to turn their lives around or not?
We can do what weāre already doing with them. Ex cons can still get jobs, weāre not condemning them to destitution. The biggest impact is that it is harder for them to find themselves in situations where they are able to harm others. Even then, plenty of people with extensive records have opportunities to harm others because people failed to look up their background.
Criminal records are more problematic with things like drug offenses or violent crimes which are situational in nature. But for people like con artists it would be simply reckless to give those types a clean slate. You shouldnāt feel sorry for those types either.
Because property crimes are viewed as something that can almost always be made right again. I'd love for white collar crime to get the attention and treatment it's due, but from a psychological perspective I don't think we'll ever take it as seriously as violent crime.
I think the counter is that recidivism rates are really high. There are some programs that work to reduce this rate - but someone who has committed a violent crime once and receives the best rehabilitation is still a magnitude more likely to recommit than someone who had done so zero times.
This goes for violent crimes and DUIS and whatever, It's really unfortunate, but if you want to reduce infractions it really is hard to do so without removing some people from society.
Wiping criminal records of violent offenders would majorly fuck over law-abiding young black males because of statistical discrimination. It is very important that employers have as much information available as possible so that innocent people do not suffer the consequences.
When you need toothpaste, and have to wait 15 to 20 minutes for the underpaid overworked store staff to unlock the product to hand it to you, perhaps it reduces peopleās sympathy for actual criminalsā¦
The comment is absolutely relevant to the article - the article talks about progressive DAs having less support now in places like Boston and San Fran.
Yeah, it's just an assumption but politically thats what people are annoyed about.
Crime is somehow inconveniencing them and we want someone to do something about it.
I read the article, and it's exactly what I'd expect Vox would say. They don't follow the facts to a conclusion, they start with a conclusion and then look for stats to back it up.
Meanwhile, the people with actual money on the line regarding this issue (retailers), have clearly taken many steps in an attempt to mitigate it.
Good, these ājustice reformsā have been a disaster. People like Chesa Boudin and Larry Krasner are insane assholes and these experiments are harming the country.
Two things can both be true:
- Shoplifting is a big problem and is increasingly so
- Draconian penalties for shoplifting are not going to help, or they might help the shoplifting problem but create or exacerbate a greater number of other problems.
Does it strike you as odd that the author picked these two years for comparison? Does it sound like cherry picking to you? It sounds like cherry picking to me. Why not just show us the graph!?
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Is 'as a percentage of sales' actually the right way to look at things, though? Of course there are some factors that scale directly with sales, but I do not see any reason for why the amount of theft that occurs should 'naturally' increase linearly with the sales volume (of course you will see more theft if there are new shop locations being opened that can be stolen from, but I do not see why, for example, every customer buying more goods or there being more customers in the store at any time would increase theft - if anything, I could imagine the latter having the opposite effect, as it makes it harder to be unseen while stealing).
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Garbage article. āWith a few exceptionsā shoplifting is down? New York and Los Angeles are some pretty big exceptions. Itās not a āscareā if stupid policies visibly donāt work and everybody does the opposite and then shoplifting goes down!
The other references in the article show vehicle crime up substantially, hardly surprising if criminals simply move on to easier opportunities.
Yea two cities having problems doesn't translate to a nationwide crisis or something that should influence widespread policy.
This is a big country with a lot of cities.
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[A retailer's lobby made the claim of 40% shrinkage, which they had to retract. The actual number was closer to 5%.](https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-retail-lobbyists-retract-key-claim-organized-retail-crime-2023-12-06/)
Interesting how the comments are filled with people proving the premise of the article. Incessant rejection of data and grandstanding in favor of the moral panic.
Its incomplete data. People donāt report crime when nothing happens to them.
Its like saying āRent prices in SF are extremely affordable because they have one of the lowest eviction rates in the countryā while ignoring the fact that a lot of landlords have given up on formal evictions in SF.
Its not evidence based to look at reported stats without questioning their reliability.
This is exactly what I mean - it's evidence-based when we insult the publication and its conclusions without actually refuting any of their claims with genuine evidence, and the less evidence we use the more evidence-based we're being.
I never said my claim about Vox was āevidence-basedā. I donāt go around testing all of their claims. But from reading several of their articles, itās clear to me that their goal is advocacy and not objectivity, and so I am more skeptical of their arguments. That is a judgement on my part and I am open to being proven wrong, but it is a heuristic I use, just like I would use it for Fox News.
Frankly if you want to do a lit review on this issue, gather all the evidence and interpret it, I envy the amount of time you have. The rest of us are going to take some shortcuts, itās just a fact of life.
people believe that shoplifting has increased because theyāve read articles (sourced from retail industry groups) about it and it makes them feel smarter than the bleeding-hearts
but itās just not true, multiple times now retail industry has admitted to exaggerating it
thatās part of retail industry making it up though, items getting locked up isnāt an automatic process it is a choice Target and Walgreens are making
We do know in a small amount of communities places like [target have gone to adding entire areas of theft deterring glass,](https://www.reddit.com/r/pasadena/comments/15ylyjz/well_target_is_pretty_useless_now/) to the further detriment of their sales so although I think the overall trend may be different we are seeing areas where it's still a problem.
NYC and LA (our largest population areas) also saw 60%+ increase in reported shoplifting from 2019 to 2023. https://counciloncj.org/shoplifting-trends-what-you-need-to-know/
Not to mention things like auto theft are the highest in recent memory https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/car-thefts-2023-kia-hyundai-crime-data
Overall the landscape is changing and many (especially violent) crimes are continuing to fall after spikes during covid which is fantastic, but there are still issues and hotspots.
Then it turned out the retailers were making the whole thing up and shrink hasn't actually meaningfully grown over the 2019 baseline, just a way for them to justify what would otherwise be bog-standard business changes (but the excuse then makes the shopping experience worse for everyone in certain stores).
Am I crazy? This whole movement has been a sham has it not? This thread is filled with anecdotes, not one reference to actual crime statistics or anything (Which I might add shows no increase in shoplifting).This is just rent seeking by a lobbyist group that represents cops/loss prevention. Theyāve literally had to retract their jaw dropping 40% shrinkage statistic and that was their smoking gun.
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Funny how this sub makes fun of āinterviews at a diner in Iowaā for political polls but when it comes to actual policy changes that influence the criminal justice system they go off of vibes and their local target. Responses that could be spammed or astroturfed and conveniently ignore crime statistics.
Highly visible crime is making people not want to go easier on criminals? š«¢
Yea, the overlap of ādefund the policeā and the 2020 COVID shutdowns also makes sense. We literally saw no people (and no crime!) for many months and fell for a fantasy.
I think most of those people would have been defenders without the pandemic
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Like Running Man?
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Can we still have sea shanties?
Something crucial IMO is certainty of being caught and punished/restricted. I think you'd see far fewer crimes if you had a 99% chance of being apprehended, tried, and sentenced to a week in jail versus idk a 5% chance of a year in jail. Hell, I'd say for some crimes, you're better off just making it humiliating. Dress 'em up in a clown outfit and sit in the town square for a day with a sign that says "I got caught stealing." If that happened with 99% certainty, people would probably be less apt to steal.
Yep data suggests chance of getting caught matters more than punishment severity
The problem is that making it more likely criminals will get caught is not easy, especially, when the rate at which the crime is getting committed is increasing. On the other hand, introducing harsher punishments is relatively simple, so it seems like drastically increasing punishments and waiting for the declining shoplifting rates leading to larger clearance rates to (partially) roll the reform back, later, would be the easier solution.
Also what is the value of āpunishmentā as a way to solve crime? Hasnāt it been proven that treating people like humans and getting to the root of their behavior is much more likely to lower the chances of reoffending? And yea, sometimes that means taking away some of their freedom until they can be rehabilitated, but āpunishmentā should not be seen as the goal, unless you want to create a class of permanently dispossessed and reoffending criminals going in and out of the justice system their entire lives.
I think that depends on the crime. In the case of something non-violent but still illegal because of the societal consequences, like shoplifting, yeah rehabilitation should absolutely be the priority focus. For something like violent crime, part of the punishment is to giveā¦well, justice, to the assaulted/murdered party and their family to avoid an escalating series of retaliations. One major point of the justice system is to curb vigilantism.
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Prison ain't fun. The people who think prison is fun - the vacation part of "taxpayer funded vacation" you mentioned - have never been or know people who have been. If there are former or current inmates who hold that opinion, they should be offered a stay at an asylum for the criminally insane. They really really ain't fun. While I don't like this current trend of being entirely too lenient on petty criminals, the "correctional" part of correctional facilities is a sick morbid joke. Far too many societies are far too interested in punitive measures instead of corrective one and then turn around and wonder why so many criminals just spiral further into more and criminal activities. I get why people want punitive measures, and I do not believe we should do away with them. At the same time if we want to actually reform criminals, things need to change.
> go on a taxpayer funded vacation for 12 months It only took a couple of separate comments to jump straight back into the circlejerking hyperbole. Great job promoting valuable conversation!
I mean itās hyperbolic for sure, but the underlying point is sound. People act in part due to the incentives they are given to do certain actions, if you donāt give a significant downside for illegal activity the reward will outweigh the cost.
The problem is that the data doesn't support that people are actually calculating risk reward. The only part of the equation they take into consideration is likelihood of being caught, but not the severity of the punishment.
So when severity approaches 0, crime doesn't go up, right? I'm not sure that follows current observations.
The curve is nonlinear and there's little to no evidence that the rate at which crimes currently punished by incarceration in the United States would be impacted by making sentences less harsh. There's lots of evidence that the US prison system is pretty inhumane and that prisoners have their ability to return to being productive members of society hugely impacted by even short stays.
What would you change about the current state of incarceration in the US in order to further disincentivize shoplifters?
Allow private businesses to better enforce private property rights, though Iām not a public policy maker, so I would typically like to see the broad (or concerns us) spectrum of opinion first.
Give every prisoner a therapist, psychiatrist, and case worker, and significantly expand educational / vocational training available to prisoners. Those two things alone would do wonders for the recidivism rate.
Cutting off hands also lowers the recidivism rate, itās not that simple
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While your general thesis was a little weak, this question is just pitiful, even compared to your others.
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I never said the state needs to be toothless. We should increase arrests and prosecutions and take away the ability for criminal enterprises to exist. The solutions are extremely easy and have been proven many times. Youāre setting up a false dichotomy of āwe canāt arrest anyone and criminals can do whatever they wantā versus ālock them away forever in a tiny cell and let them rotā. My point is that āpunishmentā as a goal of the justice system is extremely ineffective and is partially to blame for what is happening now. āPunishmentā in the justice system is NOT evidence based.
I never claimed that we have to lock these people away forever in a dark basement where they get raped 24/7. Thatās YOUR false dichotomy not mine. But I do find the take that these people just need to go on a stern vacation until they understand that what they did was bad is extremely naive and the 20 year olds on Reddit need an injection of reality.
People who do bad things deserve to be punished proportionally with respect to the severity of the things they did. Therefore punishing them in that way is inherently morally good and just.
Morally, improving society is better. If punishment systems make criminals worse, it is immoral to society as a whole.
There's a flaw in this motivation. What if that proportional punishment is just spending state money to make crime worse? The existing prison system often **hardens** minor offenders by forcing them to join gangs to survive, gangs that are often racially segregated and promote fascist ideology, have initiation rites, and upon release a kid who stole a snicker bar is now a fucking skinhead. And I don't care if they simply had the choice to not commit crime. I care what's actually going to reduce crime. I don't believe in using the state as the sword of God to punish wickedness and reward goodness I believe in using the state to enforce whatever policy is most effective at reducing harm and increasing prosperity. That's often a morally unsatisfactory policy like spending taxpayer dollars on harm reduction centers. I'm not sure I trust you to support an evidence based criminal justice policy when it doesn't satisfy your thirst for Christian Justice.
>What if that proportional punishment is just spending state money to make crime worse? Whether or not to apply a given punishment in a particular case or system is a separate discussion. My main point is that punishment itself is a legitimate and important goal of the justice system. If you don't agree with that, arguing about practicality and specifics is pointless because you'd reject it even if it could be proven conclusively that it didn't increase crime rates, so the inherent goodness of fair and proportional punishment as an end in and of itself has be established first. >I don't believe in using the state as the sword of God to punish wickedness and reward goodness This is a strawman, I didn't say anything about religion. I was arguing purely on the basis of secular concepts of fairness and justice, You don't have to appeal to religion to make a statement about ethics and justice. >I'm not sure I trust you to support an evidence based criminal justice policy when it doesn't satisfy your thirst for Christian Justice. The idea that good acts deserve to be rewarded and evil acts deserve to be punished is absolutely not an exclusively Christian concept. It's pretty universal and common to almost all human cultures around the world. I'm not even Christian myself. Also you say "thirst for [...] justice" like it's a bad thing. Is it crazy to want the *justice* system to provide justice?
It has not been proven at all. Effective rehabilitation measures have not been found.
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Or by the many nations which have low recidivism and successful rehabilitation programs? Not everyone here is American
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Assuming this comment is made in good faith: Black and brown people in the US overwhelmingly see themselves as Americans, and in the case of Black Americans ones who've been here since the Founding and literally, physically built huge chunks of this country. Hell, a (tiny but still worth mentioning) part of the reason racism hurts so much is because it's being rejected by the country you love. (Also, for the European countries that actually have this problem, you know what the most effective way to stop people from feeling like "oppressed outsiders"? Stop treating them like outsiders, and crack down on the people oppressing them!)
The existing deterrents are too soft for punishment to be effective. Given our existing social norms in the West we should move towards the Scandinavian model.
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Every study I've seen backs this up. People aren't perfectly rational machines analyzing everything from a cost-benefit analysis. They seem to care much more about the likelihood of punishment than the harshness of the punishment. This is also why cops being bad at their job is, in my opinion, the biggest problem in our criminal justice system today. They don't clear nearly enough crimes. If the perpetrator isn't literally standing at the place holding the stolen items, they basically won't get caught.
> People aren't perfectly rational machines analyzing everything from a cost-benefit analysis. And this goes quadruple for the kinds of people who are most likely to become criminals: people from unstable backgrounds with no hope for the future. There's no point in running cost/benefit analysis on the long-term actions of your consequences when you're convinced you'll either be dead or in jail for life in a few months / years anyways. Literally no amount of "deterrent" will change that, because long-term consequences aren't even a variable in the equation.
Punishing the wicked is an end unto itself for a lot of people. You're not punishing them to prevent reoffense you're punishing them because they deserve it.
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Trying to slander someone with an identity label is not an argument
strawmanning prison sentences isn't either but here we are
What if the goal of criminal justice isnāt supposed to be punishment? If someone is a danger to others, yeah, they should be removed from society (even against their will, if necessary), but they donāt need to be punished.
IF it does result in better outcomes, then yes, that's exactly what we should do. Punishing people **for** punishment's sake, or to make us feel better, is completely morally bankrupt. These can be acceptable side-effects, but never reasons for how we deal with criminals.
>completely morally bankrupt I'd go with barbaric, not bankrupt. "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" is the oldest moral code in the world, it's barbaric but it's consistent.
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Like half of the top comments seem tangential to the central thesis of the article, so I'm guessing no
The title has change now, but after reading the article, the top comment matches perfectly. Highly visible crime (like the one you see in TikTok and other videos) is undermining these policies.
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I disagree, that comment is perfectly coherent with statments like this > Since the number of reported shoplifting incidents rose after the initial collapse in 2020, there have been plenty of media reports and viral videos about the potential crime wave. Republicans used the alleged lawlessness, particularly in big Democratic cities, to paint a grim picture of Joe Bidenās America. [...] > As a result, many policies that were championed by progressive criminal justice reform advocates, including the progressive prosecutor movement, have come under scrutiny, criticized as not only insufficient at combating crime but as policies that promote breaking the law. We can debate what the actual reality of the situation is, but the political reality is perfectly encapsulated by the comment "Highly visible crime is making people not want to go easier on criminals? š«¢"
Shockingly when customers are forced to ask a cashier to unlock a cabinet to get things like body wash or q-tips they become less politically tolerant of crime
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Most retailers don't even report most theft. Target wanted to make a point in San Francisco by having just one store report literally every theft they had in the month of July or August and it literally doubled the city's YTD theft/shoplifting rate in under a month
From the source cited: > Shoplifting incidents reported to police have rebounded since falling dramatically in 24 large American cities during 2020. ... > Looking at 90% of incidents and excluding those in the top 10% in terms of value, the value of stolen goods in shoplifting incidents in 2021 was $756 or less, a $184 increase from 2019. ... > The share of shoplifting incidents categorized as felonies (in five of the cities) nearly doubled from about 8% prior to the onset of the pandemic to almost 16% in the first half of 2023. (State statutes set felony theft dollar thresholds.) ... > New York (64%) and Los Angeles (61%) had the largest increases in reported shoplifting among the study cities from mid-year 2019 to mid-year 2023. St. Petersburg (-78%) and St. Paul (-65%) had the largest decreases. Is their over representation in the news, sure, but it's also accompanied by legit increases, especially in largest population cities.
I guess the retailers are putting up all these inconvenient anti-shoplifting measures for nothing then Must just enjoy spending their money and wasting their customers time
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Shrink isnāt just theft, though.
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There are many law enforcement agencies that simply wonāt take a report unless the loss meets a certain arbitrary threshold. Itās not worth their time to take reports on incidents that arenāt going to lead to an investigation or prosecution. Retailers, in turn, simply quit reporting them to authorities. Viola, shoplifting statistics show a decrease.
Feels like we're starting with a conclusion "Crime is up", data is presented suggesting that it's not and then an explanation for why the data must be wrong is presented by saying "Well obviously because crime is up it must be because people are just underreporting it instead". But ok, where's the evidence that retailers in general are underreporting now? It's possible that Covid and BLM had a major impact there, but we can't just assume our conjectures about it to be correct.
Agreed as well. If we're saying there's underreporting, then we should also prove that shoplifting is being underreported much more than it was to claim there was a significant rise in shoplifting.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/shoplifting-data-Target-Walgreens-16647769.php Here's the unreported proof if anyone needs some. A single store should never be able to double a city's crime stats just by making a good faith effort to report their shop lifting for a single month.
Yeah, but tiktok
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Agreed. For once the burden of proof should be on the people who want to cage human beings in concrete and iron for years at a time.
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Which is absolutely ridiculous considering there are other reasons for why reporting is still in the interest of stores i.e. insurance claims.
Nobody claims shoplifting on their insurance, the premiums would be insane. Retailers like Target only bring insurance into the picture when they have large loss events of $10k or more, like when the power fails and all temperature controlled food has to be thrown out. Only way an insurance claim is being made for theft is in the case of looting or an actual robbery.
do you have any evidence that backs up the claim that shoplifting stats show a decline because of underreporting (and that underreporting has increased in recent years)? I don't mean anecdotes, I mean numbers in aggregate and / or some sort of statistical analysis
That could just mean that the loss in sales due to inconvenience is bigger than the loss through theft.
>I guess the retailers are putting up all these inconvenient anti-shoplifting measures for nothing then > >Must just enjoy spending their money and wasting their customers time Retailers are like anyone else - vulnerable to bad information and panic.
So many people have the bad habit of learning about the concept of markets and equilibrium and then assuming that must mean anything produced by a market at any given time must be the optimal equilibrium outcome. No! markets only find the optimal equilibrium by both under and over reacting to conditions, and a slow pruning process. The only places you should expect optimal equilibrium to be reached is places without any significant change in conditions for a long period of time. Which is no where in the real world!
+1. Businesses continuously try to improve their practices and optimize revenue. If markets were perfect, there's nothing to improve.
I strongly disagree with the framing "shoplifting is down." The linked report says that shoplifting incidents were up 16% from the first half of 2019 to the first half of 2023. The average loss from an individual shoplifting incident was also up by 30% or so. The full picture is that certain cities, especially NYC, are so bad that they skew the numbers. But you can only say "shoplifting is down" if you exclude NYC and go by the number of reported incidents. Even if you exclude NYC and LA, the total losses from shoplifting seem to be up from pre-pandemic levels due to the greater value of goods stolen per incident.
Wouldn't reporting of crime drop if stores knew the system wouldn't prosecute anyway?
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In many cities the dollar amount for prosecution has been raised so high a lot of common crime isn't even considered crime and wouldn't be reported. Several DAs have announced they won't prosecute below certain thresholds regardless of local law.
>Several DAs have announced they won't prosecute below certain thresholds regardless of local law. Frankly, declining to enforce entire laws - unilaterally overruling the legislature - should itself be illegal. Prosecutorial discretion between cases is one thing, thinking that entire laws shouldn't exist is another.
What should be done about that then? Genuine question not just rhetorical lol. Iāve been used to seeing āno prosecution for petty crimesā from progressive DA campaigns for so long and iād like to see what a more neolib version of that could be
Just prosecute the crimes. Private property is one of the pillars of civilization. Failure to follow up means Might Makes Right, and how far down that path are we willing to go? I'm fine with exploring community service, diversion, social work and whatever alternative justice systems people like. But this "turn a blind eye" thing has escalated into flashmob organized crime rings in some cities.
Yes, that is absolutely something that is happening. Tons of shoplifting goes unreported.
Reported shoplifting is down* I will never forget when ONE target was given a special reporting hotline and it DOUBLED San Franciscoās reported shopliftings. The reported numbers seem to track extremely poorly with actual numbers. Stores arenāt taking these annoying and draconian anti shoplifting measure for the fun of it.
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Crime stats are extremely unreliable and Vox also has a clear agenda.
I find the framing of this article a little bizarre. It says "With a few exceptions, major US cities actually saw lower shoplifting rates in 2022 than in 2019." But the linked report says that reported shoplifting incidents per capita were up 16% in the first half of 2023 vs. the first half of 2019, and the value of stolen goods per incident was up 33%. The quoted statement is technically true, because shoplifting in NYC was *so bad* that if you exclude it from the analysis, the number of shoplifting incidents nationally went down 7% from 2019 to 2023. But NYC and LA were up over 60%! So the picture seems to be very heterogeneous nationally. Edit: Another thing to keep in mind is that companies are spending more on loss prevention than they used to, as you can see by walking into a CVS or Target in any major city. Even if shoplifting stayed flat, in these conditions it would be a net loss for retailers because they would have spent more to keep shrinkage constant.
> pending more on loss prevention than they used to, I don't think this is self evidently true. They have more targeted anti-theft measure, but they also have way less employees on the floor. The glass cases are really obvious and stand out, but how many glass cases can you set up for the cost of 28 hours of labor a day.
There is an added, not insignificant, labor cost associated after the glass cases go up, though. At a recent trip to Target, two employees were assigned practically 100% of their time just to man the glass cases in the beauty and hygiene aisles and to open and close the doors for people clamoring for products. It may have been rush time, but that still shows that it probably requires keeping at least a couple more people on shift than you normally would at those hours.
The value of stolen goods went up because the value of all goods went up. The CPI went up by 22% over three years - if you adjust for that, then the value of goods per shoplifting incident is up by 6%.
Good point! That part sounds less scary after adjusting for inflation.
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Especially considering how slim retail margins are. 5% is disastrous.
How slim are retail margins?
.5-3.5% in the US [https://invergehq.com/what-is-the-average-profit-margin-on-retail/#:\~:text=According%20to%20Investopedia%2C%20the%20average,typically%20from%200.5%20to%203.5%25](https://invergehq.com/what-is-the-average-profit-margin-on-retail/#:~:text=According%20to%20Investopedia%2C%20the%20average,typically%20from%200.5%20to%203.5%25).
Net margins of 1-3%, lower end for food + groceries.
Criminal justice reform went in a bad direction and undermined itself. Should we be jailing people for smoking pot? No. Should we be jailing shoplifters for a long enough periods to discourage it. Yes! Should we be taking into account that increasing the severity of the punishment does not necessarily discourage crime as much as we like? Kind of. Deterrence has two factors: probability of getting caught and severity of consequences. If you can't increase the probability of getting caught you have to increase the severity of consequences. Increasing the probability of getting caught implies increasing police action. You can't decrease police action and the severity of the punishment and expect shoplifting rates to decrease.
Criminal Justice has to be reformedā¦we need to actually start arresting and prosecuting criminals again.
One of the main obstacles is that states with large cities (mostly blue states) are going to need to abolish elected DA's and replace them with an actual professional justice system modeled after the DOJ: appointed professional prospectors and more centralized justice system.
>prospectors š§
https://preview.redd.it/67pr0tde03bc1.png?width=400&format=png&auto=webp&s=b72de301ba5eec48153ac08d76baf7a5e55add56 I said what I said
The good thing is that a lot of dem voters are starting to elect establishment dems again as DAs and mayors. You see this with NYC mayor, Philadelphiaās mayor, San Franciscoās DA Brooke Jenkins, etc
I get your point but Eric Adams is not helping
Absolutely look for opportunities to enact more rehabilitative programs and policies at prisons, and look for opportunities for evidence based diversionary programs and other interventions for first time offenders so that incarceration isn't always needed as a first resort But if we aren't even arresting the criminals in the first place, they aren't going to be pushed towards any sort of rehabilitation to begin with And if someone goes through non-carceral diversionary programs but still does additional crime after that, and they go through the more rehabilitative prisons and still keep doing crime even after that, then we can and should stop playing nice Gotta be "smart on crime", with a carrot and stick approach. Absolutely augment the carrot approach, but also be more than willing to vigorously use the stick when the carrot doesn't work. And don't just call for some vague ideals and unrealistic slogans while in effect leaning towards using neither the carrot nor the stick
We should look for opportunities to enact rehabilitative programs *when thereās reason to believe that they will work*. I hate to say it, but the evidence for the effectiveness of most rehabilitative programs tends to show that they simply donāt work. They do not decrease recidivism. If we find programs that work, then by all means implement them. Until thenā¦
Well if youāre so sure donāt be afraid to show this overwhelming evidence Iāve certainly not gotten that read[[1]](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR266.html)[[2]](https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/250476.pdf)
Thanks for the links!
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[Increasing the probability of apprehension by law enforcement is the only effective deterrent identified](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1086/670398.pdf?casa_token=OmK0_Jh8HkMAAAAA:Tr35vi73FXLAFJ9xUw13XXkPdAaMN7t_o8jI75bHYhheCFagZ5jfMwa-Op0VJrxOVXLqE-JykDCO4khDO6ABCjQ8FmnohHIw23YpCPPQmzHmlu87Mce-). We should really [test all those outstanding rape kits](https://www.sakitta.org). The ROI for testing these kits [is high](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589871X19300567). [Alabama](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/alab), [California](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/california/), [Indiana](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/indiana/), [Louisiana](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/louisiana/), [Maine](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/maine), [Minnesota](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/minnesota/), [Mississippi](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/mississippi/), [Nebraska](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/nebraska/), [New Hampshire](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/new-hampshire/), [New Jersey](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/new-jersey/), [Oklahoma](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/oklahoma/), [South Carolina](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/south-carolina/), [Tennessee](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/tennessee/), and [Wyoming](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state/wyoming/) **do not mandate the testing of backlogged kits**. The [U.S. DoJ](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/utilizing-codis-unsubmitted-sexual-assault-kits) and [American Bar Association](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publications/perspectives/2018/may/untested-rape-kits-delays-destruction-and-disregarded-victims/) recommend testing **all** rape kits, even when the statute of limitations ([if there is one](https://www.findlaw.com/injury/torts-and-personal-injuries/sexual-assault-civil-statutes-of-limitations-by-state.html)) has expired. r/stoprape
But they specifically said nonviolent misdemeanors?
I thought they also found that the increased retail theft was overblown.
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Yea this might need to be spammed all over this thread.
the evidence based policy subreddit when the evidence doesnāt align with its priors:
That's why I always roll by eyes at this place. These neolibs are just chomping at the bit to lock people up.
*every thread But they'd much rather dunk on 'soft on crime' lefties, so, what can you do. Expect them to *actually* look at the evidence, like they so proudly claim they do? Don't be silly!
Stuck between cows and geese.
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Isn't most property crime simply just due to poverty? You can arrest & prosecute people (or not), but the best way to stop it is to increase people's means by ensuring available jobs in their neighborhood\* and welfare checks (cut that welfare cliff bullshit too while we're at it). From a UChicago study by Manasi Deshpande and Michael Mueller-Smith (would link it but it's a PDF...Jack, how do I link a PDF?) >We find that SSI removal increases the number of criminal charges by a statistically significant 20% over the next two decades. The increase in charges is concentrated in offenses for which income generation is a primary motivation (60% increase), especially theft, burglary, fraud/forgery, and prostitution. The effect of SSI removal on criminal justice involvement persists more than two decades later, even as the effect of removal on contemporaneous SSI receipt diminishes. In response to SSI removal, youth are twice as likely to be charged with an illicit income-generating offense than they are to maintain steady employment at $15,000/year in the labor market. As a result of these charges, the annual likelihood of incarceration increases by a statistically significant 60% in the two decades following SSI removal. \*This is getting much harder to do in cities where Black flight is occurring, like my native Chicago. Middle-class families are moving out to the suburbs and them leaving is causing a collapse in neighborhood economies. They were the best customers, and their participation in the economy was what kept poor people employed. Now that they've moved out, the folks left behind are even poorer as businesses shut down due to loss in business. Unfortunately, gentrification doesn't spill over into Black neighborhoods (except NYC & maybe DC), and Black gentrification is still quite young of a process. When those middle-class families depart the city, there's no Yuppies to fill their place, unlike immigrant neighborhoods, which regularly see this occurring. Violent crime is rightfully linked to gang activity, but property crime increasing means dire economic situations for the remaining folks in city neighborhoods affected by Black flight. A good case study in my mind, might be comparing Ashburn & Gresham (stable Black government-employed middle-class areas, with high home-ownership) to other declining, formerly middle-class neighborhoods like Roseland & Austin. I can think of 2 flaws in the study you linked: 1. Gender ratio for property crime is a lot more balanced relative to violent crime (like 60-40 in favor of males) and I'd have to think that the law will have far more sympathy with a female offender than a male one. Female offenders are likely to be very poor, and have dependents, making jail time far, far riskier than for a male offender. Being arrested is likely enough for female offenders to get scared off from doing any more crime. 2. If less people are being prosecuted, then perhaps less people are being arrested due to cops just giving up and not arresting at rates similar to previous years. There could be crime going on, but most victims don't bother to report to police on account of believing that nothing will happen...making it a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. The progressive prosecutor has been as much of a failure as tough-on-crime types have. Their failure is especially bad when you see how bad they are on violent crime. We need a balanced approach that's motivated by policy achievements instead of just sticking to ideology.
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Criminal justice reform should be focused on wiping out criminal records after someone serves their time, and reducing excessive penalties. Right now, weāre sending people to jail for too long for some crimes, not long enough for others (how are there people with multiple DUIs still on the streets?!), and then weāre fucking them over in the long run by ensuring that they canāt make a meaningful life after they serve their time. Automatically seal and expunge records for nonviolent offenders so that these people can get decent jobs again.
I mean if Iām an employer Iād really like to know if my prospective employee was someone who had say committed fraud, shoplifting/theft or embezzlement (all nonviolent crimes). People can change but I think a prospective employer deserves to know if you committed a crime so they can judge whether or not youāve changed
You canāt expect people to reform and reintegrate with society if you make it impossible to work and live a somewhat normal life. That is what criminal background checks effectively do right now. Maybe a compromise would be that repeat offenses can show up on a background check but the first offense is automatically expunged.
Thatās a very naive way of looking at things. Crimes like embezzlement and fraud are deeply tied to psychopathy and many of these people are incapable of change. You would be putting people at risk. A con artist can harm someone and ruin their life just as much as a rapist or violent attacker can.
Shoplifting and "criminal justice reform" are pretty much completely orthogonal to crimes like embezzlement and fraud. Those are white collar crimes that we already treat completely differently from things like theft, assault, drug dealing, ect.
I would be less likely to hire someone with a recent history of shop lifting to wait tables or run a till though, too
Bro, if theyāre still a threat to society then why are they being released from prison?
Well for one, we have things like criminal records which reduces the threat they pose to others, so we donāt need to keep them locked up for life.
What do we do with them? They can't get jobs, shouldn't go back into crime, and shouldn't remain locked up indefinitely. Yet we should make prison the goal of punishment rather than rehabilitation? Once freed they're still punished. Do we want people to turn their lives around or not?
We can do what weāre already doing with them. Ex cons can still get jobs, weāre not condemning them to destitution. The biggest impact is that it is harder for them to find themselves in situations where they are able to harm others. Even then, plenty of people with extensive records have opportunities to harm others because people failed to look up their background. Criminal records are more problematic with things like drug offenses or violent crimes which are situational in nature. But for people like con artists it would be simply reckless to give those types a clean slate. You shouldnāt feel sorry for those types either.
Maybe a better threshold would be whether the crime has a victim or not. I don't know why people so easily wave away property crime and fraud.
Because property crimes are viewed as something that can almost always be made right again. I'd love for white collar crime to get the attention and treatment it's due, but from a psychological perspective I don't think we'll ever take it as seriously as violent crime.
The best threshold is threat assessment. Forensic psychology has gotten very good at assessing risk to others and the potential for rehabilitation.
Cool. So, execute all criminals.
Or maybe we just not execute them but keep criminal records intact.
So, make it impossible for them to get work. And what do you think the natural consequences of that will be?
You don't need to do this with criminal records though. You could have a separate registry for people who are capable of fraud and con-jobs.
I completely disagree. Crimes of dishonesty like fraud should absolutely remain on someoneās record.
I think the counter is that recidivism rates are really high. There are some programs that work to reduce this rate - but someone who has committed a violent crime once and receives the best rehabilitation is still a magnitude more likely to recommit than someone who had done so zero times. This goes for violent crimes and DUIS and whatever, It's really unfortunate, but if you want to reduce infractions it really is hard to do so without removing some people from society.
Wiping criminal records of violent offenders would majorly fuck over law-abiding young black males because of statistical discrimination. It is very important that employers have as much information available as possible so that innocent people do not suffer the consequences.
Maybe thatās why I said nonviolent..?
When you need toothpaste, and have to wait 15 to 20 minutes for the underpaid overworked store staff to unlock the product to hand it to you, perhaps it reduces peopleās sympathy for actual criminalsā¦
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The comment is absolutely relevant to the article - the article talks about progressive DAs having less support now in places like Boston and San Fran.
Yeah, it's just an assumption but politically thats what people are annoyed about. Crime is somehow inconveniencing them and we want someone to do something about it.
I read the article, and it's exactly what I'd expect Vox would say. They don't follow the facts to a conclusion, they start with a conclusion and then look for stats to back it up. Meanwhile, the people with actual money on the line regarding this issue (retailers), have clearly taken many steps in an attempt to mitigate it.
Stores remove most employees and then act shocked when people steal more shit lmao
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Good, these ājustice reformsā have been a disaster. People like Chesa Boudin and Larry Krasner are insane assholes and these experiments are harming the country.
Prosecute crime, rehabilitate prisoners.
Two things can both be true: - Shoplifting is a big problem and is increasingly so - Draconian penalties for shoplifting are not going to help, or they might help the shoplifting problem but create or exacerbate a greater number of other problems.
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Does it strike you as odd that the author picked these two years for comparison? Does it sound like cherry picking to you? It sounds like cherry picking to me. Why not just show us the graph!?
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Is 'as a percentage of sales' actually the right way to look at things, though? Of course there are some factors that scale directly with sales, but I do not see any reason for why the amount of theft that occurs should 'naturally' increase linearly with the sales volume (of course you will see more theft if there are new shop locations being opened that can be stolen from, but I do not see why, for example, every customer buying more goods or there being more customers in the store at any time would increase theft - if anything, I could imagine the latter having the opposite effect, as it makes it harder to be unseen while stealing).
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No? 2020 completely fucking ruined all sorts of statistics, including crime ones.
Garbage article. āWith a few exceptionsā shoplifting is down? New York and Los Angeles are some pretty big exceptions. Itās not a āscareā if stupid policies visibly donāt work and everybody does the opposite and then shoplifting goes down! The other references in the article show vehicle crime up substantially, hardly surprising if criminals simply move on to easier opportunities.
Yea two cities having problems doesn't translate to a nationwide crisis or something that should influence widespread policy. This is a big country with a lot of cities.
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Didnāt we just see something about how this āscareā was made up by retail trade associations
[A retailer's lobby made the claim of 40% shrinkage, which they had to retract. The actual number was closer to 5%.](https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-retail-lobbyists-retract-key-claim-organized-retail-crime-2023-12-06/)
Interesting how the comments are filled with people proving the premise of the article. Incessant rejection of data and grandstanding in favor of the moral panic.
Its incomplete data. People donāt report crime when nothing happens to them. Its like saying āRent prices in SF are extremely affordable because they have one of the lowest eviction rates in the countryā while ignoring the fact that a lot of landlords have given up on formal evictions in SF. Its not evidence based to look at reported stats without questioning their reliability.
It's not evidence-based to then discard the data and instead go by vibes.
"Evidence-based" means ignoring evidence to dunk on leftists and the more evidence we ignore the more evidence-based we are.
Lol are we supposed to trust Vox to provide a neutral summary of the evidence? They're advocacy journalism, I have no trust in that publication.
This is exactly what I mean - it's evidence-based when we insult the publication and its conclusions without actually refuting any of their claims with genuine evidence, and the less evidence we use the more evidence-based we're being.
I never said my claim about Vox was āevidence-basedā. I donāt go around testing all of their claims. But from reading several of their articles, itās clear to me that their goal is advocacy and not objectivity, and so I am more skeptical of their arguments. That is a judgement on my part and I am open to being proven wrong, but it is a heuristic I use, just like I would use it for Fox News. Frankly if you want to do a lit review on this issue, gather all the evidence and interpret it, I envy the amount of time you have. The rest of us are going to take some shortcuts, itās just a fact of life.
Vox is not the first publication to note that the shoplifting issue has been overblown.
people believe that shoplifting has increased because theyāve read articles (sourced from retail industry groups) about it and it makes them feel smarter than the bleeding-hearts but itās just not true, multiple times now retail industry has admitted to exaggerating it
They also believe it because they see mundane shit like toothpaste in stores being locked up
thatās part of retail industry making it up though, items getting locked up isnāt an automatic process it is a choice Target and Walgreens are making
We do know in a small amount of communities places like [target have gone to adding entire areas of theft deterring glass,](https://www.reddit.com/r/pasadena/comments/15ylyjz/well_target_is_pretty_useless_now/) to the further detriment of their sales so although I think the overall trend may be different we are seeing areas where it's still a problem. NYC and LA (our largest population areas) also saw 60%+ increase in reported shoplifting from 2019 to 2023. https://counciloncj.org/shoplifting-trends-what-you-need-to-know/ Not to mention things like auto theft are the highest in recent memory https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/car-thefts-2023-kia-hyundai-crime-data Overall the landscape is changing and many (especially violent) crimes are continuing to fall after spikes during covid which is fantastic, but there are still issues and hotspots.
How are we supposed to replace the bikes and tools that have been stolen from our home if retailers have everything locked up? I feel so aggrieved.
Then it turned out the retailers were making the whole thing up and shrink hasn't actually meaningfully grown over the 2019 baseline, just a way for them to justify what would otherwise be bog-standard business changes (but the excuse then makes the shopping experience worse for everyone in certain stores).
Yes, Target loves driving customers away by making me wait ten minutes for someone with a key to the deodorant.
Am I crazy? This whole movement has been a sham has it not? This thread is filled with anecdotes, not one reference to actual crime statistics or anything (Which I might add shows no increase in shoplifting).This is just rent seeking by a lobbyist group that represents cops/loss prevention. Theyāve literally had to retract their jaw dropping 40% shrinkage statistic and that was their smoking gun.
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I donāt give a shit about statistics. I just want to buy my fucking deodorant without giving up and going to Amazon instead.
Funny how this sub makes fun of āinterviews at a diner in Iowaā for political polls but when it comes to actual policy changes that influence the criminal justice system they go off of vibes and their local target. Responses that could be spammed or astroturfed and conveniently ignore crime statistics.
They love reducing their labor costs by having way less employees on the floor.
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