alt Hacker NewsI don't think this is true. It's probably true that there's a pervasive belief that a hungry person probably shouldn't be punished for stealing food.
Other kinds of property crime? The costs of enforcement are high compared to the losses caused by individual cases, prioritization is understandably a difficult problem to solve.
Replies
squokko • today at 7:41 AM
It's not a hard problem to solve, you scale the punishment for the cases you prosecute so high that it makes the expected value of stealing a suitcase negative
It goes far beyond hungry people stealing bread. Look at one of those academic fraud discussions had here on HN over the past week and you'll find people saying that using AI to hallucinate an academic paper isn't a good thing but instead of judging the people who do this we should blame society itself while being understanding of the frauds. The mentality spoken above is pervasive and insidious.