Quote Originally Posted by Mojavpa
Yes, those people who are left with nothing and steal food or other essentials cannot be totally blamed. I might do the same thing.

But people are also stealing much more valuable things, which I think is appaling no matter what the circumstance is, especially when they're looting other homes There is no excuse. Sure, they're poor, and our society is unfair, and capitalism sucks, but once we start forgiving them based on their socio-economic status, then we start running down a slippery slope. Remember, some people who have lost everything but did not steal anything. Are they somehow divorced from their society? No. Some people are innately more greedy than others.

some people employ the same argument against killers and child molesters. "oh, they were brought up in poverty, or they were molested themselves. Lets be lenient on them" No. A lot of people grow up and have shitty lives, and they dont resort to committing violent crimes.
I'm not advocating being lenient on people who commit anti-social acts that harm others. I'm just saying, we should really be finding ways to attack such issues at their roots, where the problems begin, rather than just trying to punish the symptoms. It's not about letting people off the hook because of the socio-economic conditions which drive them to crime, it's about long term solutions where we try to fix those socio-economic conditions and get to the real underlying causes of crime.

Crime is a social phenomenon; it only makes sense to look at the social trends which might be causing it, and try to change things at that level. That's the only really effective way to fight crime, but the dominant philosophy nowadays is to just punish every individual who is driven to crime that we can catch, and think that is the only proper way to "fight crime". If there is too much crime, we must punish more people harder and longer, they reason. But instead of just blaming it all on some unfixable flaw in human nature, we really need to look critically at what we can do to encourage those social conditions where people don't feel obligated to commit anti-social acts.

This is not intended to be a replacement for the idea of punishing people who commit anti-social acts; it is a supplement to it, and one which would reduce the need for such punishment by reducing the number of offenses. So far police have been trying to fight crime by focusing all of their efforts on repressing the symptoms rather than fighting the disease, and it has gotten them nowhere. You can't make people stop stealing stuff just by punishing more thieves more harshly. You can only do it by eliminating their desire to steal. In a socialist society, where the means of production and the means of living are commonly owned by all who contribute to the community, nobody needs to steal just to stay alive, like millions of people under capitalism who can't get a job because they're homeless and can't get a home because they're jobless. By reorganizing the industrial capacity of our society towards actually satisfying the various needs of the populace, far fewer people will feel the urge to take what they need from their neighbors.

Any attempt to effectively fight thievery which does not recognize the importance of demolishing capitalism and the huge gulf between the rich and poor it creates is bound to fail. An economic system based on the atomization of individuals, competition, greed, and maintaining a large pool of lower-class workers to slave away for the bourgeois elite can only propagate thievery and can never stop it. Socialism is no overnight short-term solution, but it's what we need to be striving for nevertheless.
ermitonto Reviewed by ermitonto on . The Nerve of our human race... Okay, I was watchin the news, something I rarely do because it is full of reminders on how the human race is disappointing, But I wanted to find out about the hurricane, and how everything was going. I turned on the news, and they were talking about looters,and such. What the fuck is wrong with those people? There lives are in a war zone, and they have the nerve to go and steal while the cops/and others are helping people. I mean there are dead bodies, and stuff everywhere. Instead of actually Rating: 5