In legal terms, you'd have a problem with proportionality—that is, the idea that the punishment needs to fit the crime. This is partially a problem with fairness and partially a problem with incentives: if you give someone the same punishment for, say, stealing a bike and for beating someone up, then if you want to steal someone's bike you might as well beat them up to steal the bike.

If you follow this logic, you eventually get to something like 18th C England, where a LOT of stuff was punishable by death, which led to large problems with murder: if you're going to be killed for stealing, you might as well kill someone, then steal, since you've just eliminated the witness.

However, if the criminal gets 5 years for stealing a bike, and 10 years for beating someone up, the criminal might be swayed by 5 years vs 15 years.

I can see the situation where the criminal thinks "I'm already probably going to jail, might as well decrease my chances as much as possible" by beating someone up. I think most bike crimes occur when the owner isn't around though.

There is a reason horse theft used to be dealt with so severely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Horse_thief_hanging.png

Now, obviously we should not start hanging bike thieves (as tempting as that may seem) but I definitely think this is not a crime to take lightly at all.

Whether or not the decline in violent crime justifies the rise in imprisonment and the decline in prison standards, or whether there might be other ways to achieve the same declines are different questions. But the United States has become significantly safer over the last ten, twenty and fifty years.

Criminologists aren't anywhere close to a consensus on the causes of the crime rate reduction of the last few decades. Many theories have been offered, from decreased crack use, to fewer unwanted children resulting from legalized abortions, to your suggestion of harsher sentencing.

Yes, Harsher sentencing may have something to do with it, but it could just as well have increased our crime rate and been counteracted by one of the other factors.

There is no scientific consensus to support your claim.

The real answer to your first sentence is clearly "people need to commit less crime". I would suggest there's a lot of evidence showing that the threat of prison isn't deterring crime at least amongst some demographics. Do you really think greater risk of prison is going to stop bike theft by crackheads? Or homeless? Or the poor?

It's quite possible that fixing some of the social problems would be a way more powerful motivator to stop bike theft then increasing enforcement/punishment alone. Possibly way more cost effective too.

I want to live in a society free of crime. Where children and other vulnerable people move free from violence and theft.

Is that unreasonable?

What I'm questioning is your proposed method of achieving that - putting more people in prison - is it likely to help?

Does anybody seriously think that the threat of prison is deterring people from committing drug-related crime? Do you suppose a typical homeless person considers risking being put in jail for stealing to eat to be a significantly worse option than sleeping hungry and cold under a freeway overpass?

Wikipedia has some quite alarming numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St... - one in every 31 adults, one in every 11 African-Americans " behind bars, or being monitored (probation and parole)". Surely that's pretty clear evidence that the problems leading people into committing crimes are significantly more powerful than the deterrent of prison time?

No it's not unreasonable to want that, but it's probably a bit ridiculous to believe it will ever happen. And it's definitely ridiculous to believe we're going to get there by just locking more people up.

America has 5% of the world's population, but nearly 25% of the world's prisoners--do you really think we need to increase that. Over 3% of adults are under some kind of correctional supervision--where do we stop?

tl;dr: In the U.S. in only 20% of murder cases the perpetrator is found and convicted of murder, compared with (allegedly) 90% in Japan. At the same time, even if all non-violent offenders (that includes all drug offenses) were released from prisons in the U.S. tomorrow, the U.S. would still have double the incarceration rate of Western Europe.

I don't know enough to have an opinion either way, but intuitively this message has a true ring to it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3696583

On your second link, the first half is reasonable, but the second half utterly misses the point. The reason why the police wait in 'The Wire' and in real life is because they're gathering evidence. If they don't have enough evidence, the case won't stick. Similarly, they're trying to catch the kingpins. If you catch the front-line dudes you can fill your prisons with them, but there will always be more (in places where it's bad, like where the Wire is set).

It's weird that given the US already has such an immense problem with overincarceration that you think the solution is to lock people up over even more trivial issues. Where are those people going to be stored? Given the already clogged courts, aren't you going to have to abandon due process in order to get so many through?

It's pointless, really, because if you honestly don't think that overincarceration is 'actually a problem', then you're so one-eyed that nothing I say will sway you.

I mean, you're saying here that somehow the state would get more money back from the private prisons than they paid them, so they could spend this surplus on courts?

Would you allow your 6yo to walk alone at night through any city in the US?

I think you should be able to. I think a person should be able to live anywhere in the US without encountering violence on a daily basis, without hearing gunshots every night.

Because that isn't true, I think there is too much crime.

Increased incarceration and police powers reach an eventual point of diminishing returns.

Do you know what the likelihood of a 6 year old being abducted or killed by a stranger are? Do a google search and you'll probably be surprised by how uncommon it is. Fewer children are abducted in the classic "stranger danger" manner (unknown attacker as opposed to a friend or family member) than are struck by lightning each year.

If we can save 10 6 year olds per year, is it worth incarcerating 100 extra people, 1000, 10,000...1,000,000? At what point does the increased risk of snaring innocent people, and the financial cost outweigh the small gains in "safety"?

This is a surprising stance to encounter on HN. The article I linked to asserted that although crime in NYC has gone drastically down, incarceration rates have not gone up. I found that interesting, do you?

Elsewhere in this thread you suggest executing bike thieves as they commit theft, and although I'm not sure you were entirely serious, I'm afraid we're going to agree on much about this issue.

That would be a statistic, too.

Already exists:

https://www.immobilise.com/view.php?stage=product&catego...

Goes down the seat tube and is a one-way insert only. Cannot be pulled back out, and is too large to push down and get out of the bottom bracket shell.

I actually have those installed in all my bikes.

Far simpler though: Every one of my bikes is littered with very small notes saying "If this bike was not brought into the shop by David Kitchen it is stolen, please call 07740949xxx".

Those notes are in the stem, under the bar tape, under the rim tape, in the bottom bracket shell, in the seat tube, in the seat post. Everywhere you can hide a small note whilst building the bike that will be found when servicing the bike.

I printed them on plastic using a Dymo machine, they weigh nothing... and if my bikes were stolen then one day they will arrive in a bike store for a service, and be returned to me.

Taggle Systems are focussing first on remote reading of water meters and other water utility use cases, but once networks are in place then tracking bikes will be doable.