Poor Baby Cried When Caught Stealing Copper

Should have been charged under "RICO", Fed time....

and someone he stole from suffered a heart attack worrying about things. Little side effects like that get overlooked.

Well, wah, poor baby. Does the phrase "get a rope, boys" mean anything? It should.

As to the restitution angle, this is a sop to people who ache for these poor down-trodden folks with sticky fingers. If the guy could pay it, he would not have been out stealing other people's property and damaging their lives.



And you know this because... ?



Probably. Judges tend to go easier on those who did not instigate the crime and who cooperate with the police and the court.

I read about these stories every few weeks in the local papers. Every year this kind of crime is becoming more frequent. The worst one I read actually happened to a church a few blocks away from my old house. While renovating the church they removed the bronze church bell and placed in an outlying shed until the renovations were complete. The next weekend the bell was missing. To date the local PD has found no leads, but they believe it was taken for scrap. I have no sympathy for any of these criminals.

In the Australian justice system, that guy would have been sentenced to no more than six months jail, with no restitution to anybody. He would have picked up many more criminal skills in jail from the other inmates, anyway.

The cost to the community for continuous incarceration of a prisoner in Australia is well over $100k pre year.

On that basis, the cost to the community for his incarceration would be at least $1.5 million.

here are the lyrics of a well-known traditional Australian song.
The penultimate line is sage advice: one that I remind my sons as opportunity presents itself.

Botany Bay

Farewell to old England forever
Farewell to my rum culls as well
Farewell to the well known Old Bailey
Where I used for to cut such a swell

Singing Tooral liooral liaddity
Singing Tooral liooral liay
Singing Tooral liooral liaddity
And we're bound for Botany Bay

There's the captain as is our commander
There's the bosun and all the ship's crew
There's the first and the second class passengers
Knows what we poor convicts go through

Taint leaving old England we cares about
Taint cos we mis-spells what we knows
But because all we light fingered gentry
Hops around with a log on our toes

These seven long years I've been serving now
And seven long more have to stay
All for bashing a bloke down our alley
And taking his ticker away

Oh had I the wings of a turtle dove
I'd soar on my pinions so high
Slap bang to the arms of my Polly love
And in her sweet presence I'd die

Now all my young Dookies and Dutchesses
Take warning from what I've to say
Mind all is your own as you toucheses
Or you'll find us in Botany Bay


Whilst it has a convict's point of view, apparently it was written a long time after that era.

Still, it could have been worse.

I am still trying to wrap my mind around the logistics involved in stealing an entire bridge....

I imagine that steel was needed for something else (maybe even another bridge in another location crazy enough) as anyone with the ability and means to lift an entire bridge overnight, is either a terrorist group or drug gang perhaps. If they did steal it simply for the scrap value, they would have connections such as a crime boss for example who has a legit store front in the form of you guessed it a scrap refinery....