Here we are on HN, once again debating criminalizing poor people for not having opportunities, about if it's better to fine poor people or imprison them, treating those as solutions, instead of something just making the problem worse.
The problem is poverty. How come when we try to incentivize the rich, we give them stuff like tax breaks, but when we want to incentivize the poor, we punish them and take their money or freedom away?
People are so focused on if it's wrong to take something that doesn't belong to you, they don't ask if it's wrong to have something and not give it away to someone who needs it more than you do.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/269557/gross-profit-and-...
Because it's not comfortably middle class Americans who have good paying jobs who are repeatedly shoplifting, it's poor people who don't have a significantly better options.
Treating their crimes as the most salient aspect of them by calling them thieves and criminals ignores their poverty, instead of treating it as a systemic societal problem which harms us all.
This wasn't a natural experiment in any case, pre/post the law, you can't blame the law for shoplifting, other variables weren't fixed and thus confound the results. I expect rent increases, increases in the prices of food and other consumer goods and so on have a much bigger impact on shoplifting. Even if you could, if it wasn't shoplifting it would be some other means of making ends meet.
Poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, these are problems our country absolutely has the means to address, and investing in stopping them pays dividends not just in higher tax revenues but in decreased crime.
And with that in mind, isn't it smarter to take some of the money dedicated housing prisoners, policing the poor, managing them through the criminal justice system, and using it to help them so they don't have to steal?