Percentage of Thiefs Who Steal Again
Too Many People Are Locked Up for Small Thefts
An estimated 45,000 Americans are backside bars for thefts of less than $10,000. The penalisation doesn't fit the crime.
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The U.s.a. has made some progress in reducing the shockingly large share of the population that lives backside confined, by and large past dialing dorsum the War on Drugs. Building on this progress requires similar changes in the treatment of nonviolent holding law-breaking.
In New York, as in many other states, stealing more than than $ane,000 is a felony. A person who grabs a new iPhone tin can end upwardly in prison, at public expense, for four years.
In New Jersey, which has the near stringent standard in the United States, a person can be convicted of a felony for stealing more than $200 — a number that hasn't changed since 1978.
Treating what amounts to petty theft every bit a felony is draconian. In American society, it is difficult to recover from a felony conviction. It is hard to find work, difficult to find housing, hard to rebuild a life. Incarceration is also expensive and ineffective. New York spends almost $threescore,000 per prisoner per year, but there is little evidence the penalization deters the offense.
In a 2016 analysis, researchers at the Pew Charitable Trusts looked at thirty states that increased felony theft thresholds between 2000 and 2012. Property theft rates fell nationwide during that period; the written report found no show that the reject was any slower in those states. The analysis also found no human relationship between the level of the threshold and the level of property criminal offense. States that set thresholds at a relatively loftier level, like $ii,000, did not experience more belongings crime than states that ready thresholds at a relatively low level, like $500.
Brian Benjamin, a state senator from New York City, sees a articulate lesson in that experience. He plans to introduce legislation to raise the state's felony theft threshold to $five,000. With a few exceptions, thefts of lesser value would instead be misdemeanors. Offenders would be punished, but the path to rehabilitation would remain relatively articulate. (Any robbery, meaning theft by force, would remain a felony. The proposal is focused on nonviolent law-breaking.)
"We want a system that penalizes people simply doesn't destroy their lives," he said.
New York is among a minor number of states that have not updated felony theft thresholds in recent decades. But the legislation isn't just about catching up. It would break ground.
The $5,000 threshold would be the highest in the nation. It would be twice as high as in the next highest states, Wisconsin and Texas, where the threshold is $two,500. But it still may not be high enough. While states have moved thresholds upward in recent decades, they have erred on the side of caution. In a 2016 report, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University estimated that 45,000 Americans were behind bars for thefts of less than $10,000. Information technology argued that their incarceration was non in the public interest and that people bedevilled of such thefts should instead be fined and required to make restitution or perform community service.
Since 2009, Florida has allowed some people charged with low-value theft to stay out of prison by agreeing to conditions such every bit state supervision, drug testing, participation in customs service and making restitution to victims. A 2019 state assay concluded that participants were less probable to steal again than those bedevilled of theft who served fourth dimension in prison.
Nether Mr. Benjamin'southward legislation, New York would be the merely land to index felony theft thresholds to aggrandizement. Stealing $ane,000 today is the rough equivalent of stealing $500 three decades ago. New York's inaction in leaving its standard unchanged in nominal terms has fabricated that standard more callous over time. To prevent this kind of slippage, the country would review the threshold every five years and make adjustments in increments of $50. For instance, if aggrandizement averaged 2 per centum a year over the period, the threshold would ascension to $5,500.
Aggrandizement adjustment is bones housekeeping. It makes little sense to allow aggrandizement to erode legal standards. Anybody understands the need to conform taxation brackets and Social Security benefits for inflation. The same rationale applies to adjusting felony theft thresholds.
New York in contempo decades has been at the forefront of the national attempt to reduce prison populations. State leaders have recognized that the social and economic costs of incarceration are high and are borne unduly by minority communities and that many prisoners pose no existent gamble to public safety.
Between 1999 and 2020, New York's prison population declined by 47 percentage. The state has reduced the severity of punishments for nonviolent drug crimes. It has reformed bail rules and then that fewer people are jailed earlier trial, and information technology is considering necessary reforms to its parole system. New York imprisons more people for technical parole violations than any other state.
But none of these changes arrive enough. New York's incarceration charge per unit remains loftier, both past historical standards and by comparison with the rest of the developed world, because New York continues to use prison as the default penalisation for too many crimes. The state tin can fix an instance for the rest of the nation by adopting a more sensible approach to property offense.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/opinion/felony-theft-law-new-york.html
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