It seems bonkers, until you realize that that person who gets 5 years in prison for his 4th petty shoplifting offense is generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of checks being written to people who work within and who are contractors for the justice system. And on the streets, fighting crime is another place where massive checks are written in order to protect the public from small-time street and property crime.
If people are robbing other people for $100, especially in 2023 dollars, that's too stupid to be a failure of society, that has to be because small-time crime is a resource for a lot of justice system-connected industries, and as long as maintaining the level of it doesn't pit those industries against real estate interests, they can lobby for crime.
I think there are really three kinds of crime:
1) Crimes of need, where people need to feed themselves or their loved ones, so resort to crime because they're willing to risk their lives and their freedom,
2) Crimes of stupidity, where people just don't understand how unlikely they are to get away with something, or how bad the punishment could be, so they undervalue the cost of undertaking those crimes for the benefit they stand to gain, and
3) Crimes of compulsion, where people have enough, and mostly understand the costs and the benefits, yet risk their lives and freedom for more for some irrational reason; degenerate gamblers.
We can prevent all crimes of need immediately and easily. It's more difficult to prevent crimes of stupidity, but pouring education into everyone is the answer. It's idiopathic crimes of compulsion that are hard to deal with, because people have wildly different reasons for their compulsions.
As a society, we pour all of our efforts into crimes of compulsion, the only kind of crime that we're virtually guaranteed to be ineffective at stopping, and bad at controlling. Where the discussions between political factions are about whether we should kill them, give them therapy, drug them, corral them far away from people, let you look them up on a website after they're free, refuse them work, let them vote, etc., in the context of assuming that the vast majority of crime has unique causes and solutions. To assume that, we have to ignore that people are still sticking other people up for $100.