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The hypothetical was an extreme to illustrate the point. Yes, in practice, enforcement isn't perfect, so a week is too short and you want escalating sentences. The point that effective policing is higher leverage than increasing sentences remains.
... no? Like stores do, currently, have security guards. We could just empower them to arrest shoplifters. That would be fine. (edit: this includes fixing the laws that create extreme liability for doing that)
Isn't most crime committed by young people? There's a steady supply of fresh young people, and arresting them 5 years after they're young isn't even going to stop them from having kids to form the next (on average) generation of criminals. Like the US, today, does up arresting most violent criminals for long periods of time eventually, and it hasn't fixed the crime problem.
I am not convinced it is relevant to the point or real life. The police that appears within a minute to 100% of crime scenes is practically impossible yet causes major consequences of the stated hypothetical. You can make many points with similarly strong but unrealistic assumptions.
If I assume an existence of a 100% effective at 1-month drug and crime rehabilitation program (criminal turned into citizen who will never commit a crime and is no longer drug addict), it is obvious that we should use such program to rehabilitate all criminals. I believe lot of progressive politics are result of median democrat who believes in such program, that with "enough" social services, one could disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, problem solved. To some extent modern prisons are outgrowth of similar Victorian era ideas. The problem is that such programs don't exist.
Coincidentally, I agree that the legal processing time from arrest to punishment should be reduced. It is more effective to discuss it more realistic assumptions .
Your hypothetical did not stipulate age limits, by the way. Most criminals start young, too, as teenagers, so a shoplifting 14-year old would be in prison before they turn 20. And even in the US, most prisoners go free eventually. Most crime can't committed by re-offenders unless they have an opportunity to re-offend. If you get to "tag" every criminal today and put them all permanently away with 5 year lag, all habitual criminals are gone after the first wait period, and there will be left only those criminals who started committing crime during those 5 years. Further 5 years down, they are also permanently removed from society. Within the rules of thought experiment, I think this should work to reliably but slowly reduce the number of criminals around.
I agree that realistically it wouldn't be like this, but again, the experiment as specified is not realistic.
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They're already empowered to arrest shoplifters. It's just so much of a liability concern that it's cheaper to tell them not to in almost all cases.
Yeah, what I mean by empower them to is remove all of the obstacles like that that prevent them from doing so. The liability concerns are a consequence of specific laws and precedents, and laws can be changed.
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