Re:Why Stealing Cars Went Out of Fashion
by _delirium on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @07:44AM
(#8167367)
I can believe there are places that happen to have both harsh penalties and low crime rates, but I'm more skeptical of a general relationship. I believe studies in the U.S. have found that varying probability of punishment significantly varies deterrence (people aren't deterred if they believe they have a low chance of being caught), but that revising sentence levels upwards or downwards has virtually no effect.
As long as we're trading anecdotes, I live somewhere with very lenient penalties for crimes and what you describe is also true here. People typically don't even bother with a cable lock, they just use an O-lock [1] that locks the rear wheel to itself, whose main purpose is to make it inconvenient to ride off with the bike.
I thought this would be obvious, but I am not arguing for 16 year sentences for stealing food. Food theft is one thing for which the penalty is a real conundrum (maybe the guy was really hungry).