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It includes more people than you think it does. I can recall the following instances from high school where I was either aware of or partially complicit in theft:
One friend of mine would steal practically anything he could out of museum gift shops whenever we were on field trips. I don't even know that he necessarily wanted the stuff he was stealing. He was a good kid who got good grades and came from a good family. He's currently some kind of engineer for General Electric.
A group of us decided to whitewash the local graffiti tunnel just after all the seniors in our graduating class painted their names on it. A friend who worked at Wal Mart put several hundred dollars worth of white paint on the loading dock for us to steal. We kept joking about it being a heist. I wasn't there for the actual heist, but I participated in the whitewashing.
Two friends of mine were convicted in juvie court for stealing plants from a local nursery that they intended to give as Mother's Day gifts.
On the band trip junior year my roommates and a few other friends did a grab and run of beer cans out of the cooler in the hotel bar. My role was to create a distraction by trying to get served underage and getting into an argument with the bartender.
I was at a Halloween party and a bunch of us piled into a Dodge Neon and drove to a farm field nearby where we proceeded to grab pumpkins and throw them in the back of this one kid's El Camino. This fat, black cop who was the local fuzz showed up and started chasing us while running with a flashlight. I remember I had to jump a fence at the edge of the field and I actually stopped to let him catch up because I wanted to see how he negotiated it; he was trying to wriggle his fat ass underneath it and I started laughing before continuing running. We all had to walk back to the party, and when the officer showed up and saw all the pumpkins my friend's parents said that they told everyone to bring a pumpkin to the party.
I'm not aware of any of the people involved in the above incidents having any contact with the law whatsoever as adults. I also spent 4 years working for the Boy Scouts and dealing with kids all the time who, while I don't have any specific knowledge of criminal activities, they were the kind of jackwagons who I wouldn't be surprised if they stole something. The entitled rich kid brats who are bound and determined to see how close to the line they can get before I have a talk with their scoutmaster about my ending their participation in my program.
When people say shit like this I always get an image of the naive mom who says "well certainly my David would never do anything like that!" Kids are idiots, and if you think that the impact of harsh punishments for petty crime among teenagers would be limited to minorities and poor people, well, I have some swampland in Jersey for sale.
Sounds to me like you just hung out with a particularly bad crowd. Nobody I knew growing up was anything like this (and I come from a rather poor background, probably much lower class than yours).
Plural of anecdote is not data, personal experience not necessarily representative, etc.
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It sounds like you and your friends were idiots. My friends and I didn’t get up to anything this bad. Of course we did stupid shit, but none of it involved theft. My parents would have been mortified to learn I was involved in stealing anything.
Also, I don’t know what gives you the impression that I support draconian punishments for first-time teenage offenders. In any of the anecdotal scenarios you referenced, I’d be happy to see the kids involved forced to do some sort of community service. The people for whom I have zero sympathy, and for whom I prescribe maximally harsh penalties, are habitual offenders.
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Sure, kids steal stuff and do other bad things. But it is certainly possible, in principle, to have a system of law and enforcement that comes down hard on shoplifting gangs and habitual criminals while applying consequences to the girl swiping some earrings at Claire's which, while unpleasant, are not ACTUALLY life-ruining.
That when people ask for that, they're offered tyranny -- "OK, but if your kid does anything wrong we're going to have him thrown into the general population with the father-stabbers and mother-rapers" -- or anarcho-tyranny -- "We'll start by throwing middle-class kids in jail if they step out of line and if that doesn't work, maybe we'll consider moving on to the gangs" tends to make them stop asking for enforcement. But that's because the responders are acting in bad faith and don't actually want to stop the problem.
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