Father-of-two, 25, sentenced to life for stealing a POWER TOOL - Louisiana

[cascadiance]

42. The problem is that many non-violent crimes are felonies to help those doing them get arrested...

What many fail to understand when the prison industrial complex and other similar special interest groups push for us to have 3 strikes and mandatory sentencing laws, etc., is that not all felonies are violent crimes, and therefore shouldn't be dealt with equally as a "path to a life sentence" the way that some of these special interests espouse they should be when they get them passed.

I know for a fact that in many states shoplifting is a felony for what many reasonable people earlier felt was a way to allow for pragmatic citizen's arrests of shoplifters by store detectives or other store personnel when they catch someone stealing, so that they can hold them until police can arrive to take them in to custody if they feel the act of stealing warrants them pursuing having that person arrested. If shoplifting were a misdemeanor, in many states store owners/personnel could do nothing to stop them without a police officer present. You could imagine in those situations how so many real criminals would realize this and we'd have rampant stealing in stores in this economy without those kind of laws in effect. That or a huge police presence in almost every business you walked in to. I think there are some states that have a certain non-violent felony category of laws to fit in between those defined as misdemeanors (traffic and parking tickets) and more violent felonies. In those states, if they were to have a three strikes law, perhaps having drug possession and shoplifting wouldn't count towards a three strikes sentence or something like that, and you might have a better rationale for such three strikes laws in those cases.

I understand this because I used to work as a store detective and this was made clear to us to ensure we knew when we could make a citizen's arrest and when we couldn't and how we had to do it, etc. So, even though there were perhaps reasonable motivations for defining shoplifting as felonies earlier, the subsequent efforts to put in three strikes laws were either ignorant of these side effects, or purposefully manipulative to grow the prison population as is being done with so much other legislation by those lobbying for the prison industrial complex.