I mean that's the "revenge" school of thought, but there's two others; "rehabilitation", where people are re-educated otherwise, and the more difficult one... why do people steal in the first place?
In practice it'll be things like poverty, lack of other opportunities, etc. Give people an education, gratifying jobs, a purpose in life and crime will drop.
Different people respond to different things. But I do think the US system is a bit too punitive. A lot of states have stuff like free community college for those who want it. But guess what? they still have a lot of car radios and catalytic converters being stolen.
> Give people an education, gratifying jobs, a purpose in life and crime will drop.
I agree with everything but the first word of this sentence, "give". The challenge is that you cannot "give" someone self-respect, purpose in life, or gratitude. These are things which must be internally developed by people through their life experiences. The best we can do as a society is improving early childhood development and parenting, but once someone is an adult, it is exceptionally difficult to impossible to change someone's direction absent any desire to change on that person's part.
The people doing these things are generally young adults or adults. Someone is not breaking into my garage to steal my tools because of "poverty" except in the most abstract definition. Generally, it's to feed a drug addiction, a drug addiction the person acquired due to self-medicating for ennui and depression or other mental health issues, mental health issues that may be partially caused by environment or genetics (we don't know, social / psych science is not there yet), and contributed to by the state of society and a complete lack of self-respect (someone with self-respect wouldn't stoop to theft).
The opposition to your mode of thinking isn't "oh no socialism", it's about complete elimination of accountability, respect, ethics, and root cause analysis as part of the process. You cannot "give" someone an improvement in their internal state. Or as the saying goes "You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink."
In practice it'll be things like poverty, lack of other opportunities, etc. Give people an education, gratifying jobs, a purpose in life and crime will drop.
But that sounds too much like socialism.