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Copper theft: Case study in failed criminal penalty enhancements

Every two years, Texas legislators troop to the House Criminal Jurisprudence and Senate Criminal Justice Committees to promote a seemingly endless array of penalty "enhancements," i.e., creating new crimes or increasing the penalties for existing ones in a one-way ratchet that has filled the prison system to capacity. But none of those legislators ever come back to tell us whether those "enhancements" solved the problem, and for the most part they almost universally fail.A great example is copper and other scrap metal theft. In 2007, then House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee Chairman Aaron Peña carried legislation that boosted penalties of any amount of copper and other industrial metals to a state jail felony, no matter what its value, at the behest of construction and utility companies who cited growing metal thefts to sell for scrap...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on March 15, 2011 (boomark / email).