What would you propose instead? That someone who steals the bread from your table can't be convicted of anything? We tried something like that recently and the results were pretty toxic.
You're missing the essence. That those who are desperate and poor can be punished easily, swiftly, harshly, but those who are wealthy tend to avoid punishment and when it even occurs it is with herculean effort, sluggish, and limp.
An easy comparison of sorts is that often the penalty for stealing millions or even billions as a white collar criminal will be lower (or functionally lower) than that for stealing hundreds, or the punishments for nonviolent drug crimes (to remove the aspects of possible violence).
Or, to focus on the quote's notion about sleeping under a bridge -- it's often that penalties exist exclusively harming the poor and uninfluential, but which are trivial to get around if you have resources. A desperate rich person laments they had to pay for an overpriced room and were so robbed -- A desperate poor person may sleep in wretched conditions only to be penalized by a law that was virtually never going to affect the rich person to begin with.
(I don't mean to open up any debate about e.g. homelessness either, as there's nothing noble about most modern mentally-ill homeless severe-addicts; i implore you to look at the deeper structure of the quotation / expression)
> You're missing the essence. That those who are desperate and poor can be punished easily, swiftly, harshly, but those who are wealthy tend to avoid punishment and when it even occurs it is with herculean effort, sluggish, and limp.
This is the fully orthogonal problem. In one case you're complaining that there is a law against theft that applies uniformly to everyone but only the poorest are desperate enough to steal. You can't fix this by making the law imply non-uniformly, because things fall apart if there exist people who are allowed to steal with impunity. You have to solve it some other way.
In the other case there is a law against theft which is intended to apply uniformly but the rich manage to steal anyway and then weasel their way out of the consequences. In this case causing the law to imply uniformly to everyone is the solution.
Yeah, but people who shoplift expensive non-edible items don't neatly fall into the "poor paupers" category. I would even call them predators preying on small shops and their owners.
At the end of the day, most theft in the developed world is not motivated by mere poverty, but harder-to-address things like having a drug habit. I don't really see the case for decriminalization of theft in general.
I do see a case for financing research into drug dependence and treatment thereof - the current (unexpected) results around GLP-1 agonists seem to indicate that there is a pharmacologic way to treat addiction. But that is somewhat orthogonal to the original criminal law problem.
