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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

We can probably agree it doesn’t make sense to go through the cost and effort to prosecute someone who stole $0.01. And it does make sense to prosecute someone who stole $1,000,000. So there is some threshold number on the border between “makes sense” and “doesn’t make sense”. What is that number and how do you calculate it?

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I reject this framing. There is more to life than dollar value. Petty thiefs destroy social trust and cohesion, and this destroyed trust has bigger value than the value of items they stole.

Additionally, remember that the goal of prosecution and punishment is to deter crime, and so you should not only consider the cost of prosecution vs the cost of stolen item, but also the cost of all the crimes you enable when the thieves learn there is no punishment for petty crime.

I’m not sure but it sounds like you’re arguing that the non-monetary cost to society of petty theft in general justifies prosecution of any amount stolen. This seems like a much more extreme view than I was even arguing against. I believe the threat to “social trust and cohesion” is at least directly proportional to the monetary amount stolen and therefore there is still a lower bound to what makes sense to go after. I don’t know how you’d calculate that bound though given the non-monetary cost is hard to quantify.

It is immature to attribute financial cost to everything. What you say is social trust and cohesion is what accountants call goodwill, the value above the net worth of a corporation or something operating that is uncountable.

Prioritizing social trust and cohesion through omitting or ignoring by misdeeds of institutions or individuals that are too big to fail seems like extra effort to achieve nothing. It isn't real trust and cohesion, it is deception and coercion.

I’m not sure I understand what you are saying, but I stand by my assertion that it is a waste of the state’s limited time and budget to prosecute someone over stealing a penny. I’m honestly surprised that this seems to be a massively unpopular opinion here.

Yes, I think it does justify that. I think we should prosecute every case of theft, unless the victim explicitly asks that we don't. Of course, the punishment should be proportional to the crime (so that e.g. first time shoplifting offender could get 1 day of jail time), but we must prosecute every case if reasonable, most certainly if we know who the perp is, and have solid evidence of the crime, and we must escalate the punishment for repeat offenders.

If you don't do that, you get ridiculousness like this: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/steal...

> Petty thiefs destroy social trust and cohesion, and this destroyed trust has bigger value than the value of items they stole.

This is a very good point.

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