> One of the ways to prevent theft is to insulate the power lines going into neighborhoods.

This is going to be less effective going forward due to insulation piercing connectors, which simply clamp around an insulated conductor and pierce the insulation to connect to the conductor underneath.

A suitably insane person could also just strip the insulation from a small segment of the conductor, one phase at a time, and hand wrap a splice conductor around the live one and tape it up.

Great news for the monkeys though! I would not want to witness a monkey making contact with two uninsulated conductors on different phases, yeesh.