It sounds so easy and makes for great political sound-bites: all we need to do to solve our crime is get tough on the criminals and lock them up.
The questions are where are we supposed to lock them up and what price are we willing to pay?
Go on line as I did and you will find that our prisons are full, many of them overfull. There is no place to lock all the criminals in our country up.
The reason that the criminals who are stealing our stuff are not locked up for long sentences is that it is judged more important to focus on locking up those criminals who were a threat to do bodily harm to us, rather than to focus on those criminals who were threat to our stuff.
Personally I would rather have the criminals taking my stuff and the stuff of others rather than inflicting bodily harm on myself and others. Stuff can be replaced, people can’t.
If you want to start tossing property criminals in jail tomorrow – which murders, rapists etc, do you propose to leave or put on the streets, just so you stuff is safe?
Building more prisons will require years and billions of dollars, not to mention operating costs.
It seems far more sensible and a far better use of our taxpayer dollars to address the core of the problem, rather than allowing the problems to continue to fester and grow while we build more prisons and throw an ever increasing number of people into prison.
Much of the property crime is fuelled by the need to buy drugs. You eliminate the need to purchase drugs by getting people into recovery and wellness, you eliminate the associated property crime.
We can spend our billions locking people up, until they get out and go back to criminal activities. Or we could invest our billions in housing and the support services required to bring about rehab, recovery and wellness. We can accomplish rehab, recovery and wellness because it is being done in jurisdictions that want to get off the merry-go-round of increasing crime and who have chosen to decrease crime by addressing the core of the problems and issues.
This approached does not make for good sound-bites; it is not simple and fast or neat and tidy or what people want to hear; but it is the approach that that will work, that will in fact reduce not only property crime but the overall cost to taxpayers.