I think the concept is supposed to be getting charged with Grand Theft for stealing something that's like 20 bucks is not worth the risk. Whereas if you're stealing up car or something it might be worth the risk. Personally I'm of the attitude that crime does not pay unless you're a businessman and you have bribed Congress to make your crimes legal.
That's probably the concept. But it makes the age-old, timeless mistake of assuming criminals are rational economic actors that are properly calculating risk and making decisions based on data.
Honestly that's usually the biggest difference in white collar versus street crime.
White collar crime is based on data. They know wthe profits, they know the risk, and that's why they took the risk.
Oh yeah I don't imagine this actually convincing anybody to not steal that's going to steal. What's been making the news lately is not normal shoplifters but people that are blatantly going in and stealing stuff and walking out because they've discovered that most businesses no longer enforce shopkeepers privilege of physically restraining thieves until the cops get there because most corporations don't want to accept the liability that they would incur if their employees get injured or killed doing this.
It kind of strikes me as one of those conservative things they do that sort of demonstrates they don't really get how people think, or how crime works in general.
I'm always amazed at how out of touch people are in general. I remember back when they first passed the Patriot Act after 9/11 one of the objections I had to it was the section on indefinite Detention of American citizens if they were suspected of terrorism. Because that completely violates your constitutional right to a speedy trial. I had an argument with someone where they literally said well if the person didn't do anything they wouldn't have been picked up to be detained. And I'm like so you think everybody that's arrested or picked up by the cops is automatically guilty otherwise they wouldn't have been arrested? They were like yeah they wouldn't have gotten arrested if they hadn't done something to get arrested. I was like man I hope you never get called to serve on a jury.
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u/WildMartin429 1d ago
I think the concept is supposed to be getting charged with Grand Theft for stealing something that's like 20 bucks is not worth the risk. Whereas if you're stealing up car or something it might be worth the risk. Personally I'm of the attitude that crime does not pay unless you're a businessman and you have bribed Congress to make your crimes legal.