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These are professional gangs. they ransack stores and steal thousands of dollars of merch at a time. It's not at all like teenagers shoplifting out of boredom or for an occasional CD here and there. Sometimes they use kids due to less severe punishments. It needs to be treated as an organized crime problem, not just a behavioral one or economic scarcity one. The above solutions are useless and fail to do that.
The fed. govt. needs to get involved, to lessen the burden from states in charging and imprisoning these offenders. this is an instance where states do not have enough resources to fight the problem, and shows the limitations of states' rights. bail reform is a problem too. Instead of trillions wasted on education and other useless or overpaid stuff, divert that $ to prison spending where it's needed most. The ROI from putting away criminals, who impose a cost on everyone, is way greater than spending trillions to raise reading scores by .001%.
Why are states limited?
states may not have the resources to imprison and prosecute a lot of shoplifters . prison overcrowding is a problem for state governments, which means releasing prisoners too soon like during covid. the federal govt. is not limited in this regard.
I would guess state capacity is larger than federal.
federal is only 10% of total prison population but federal budget is obviously way bigger and can easily scale to accommodate more prison spending.
Well yes federal government has more budget true. But crime has historically been the province of states and they are the ones with the expertise.
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