Cultural heritage aside, it's incredible that someone can rob someone to the tune of eight million dollars, and their punishment is a few years of house arrest, while someone who steals candy from a bodega gets to spend years if not decades in prison.
I don't want these two dingdongs to rot in prison; I want our justice system to treat all criminals proportionally.
The 3 strikes rule is indeed a problem, but besides that the parent still has a point. A lot of the low-value robberies involve threats or violence, where as high-value art thefts pretty much never do.
What's worse, Nuisance crime or high impact crime? Do we come down on the fellow who stole a Twix bar for the n-th time or do we lock up the guy who proved that we really need million-dollar locks and alarms for the library holdings?
To play devils advocate, part of the purpose of prison is to shield society from people who are particularly damaging to society. Repeat offenders have shown that even after being given repeated negative reenforcement, they will still carry out activities damaging to society.
I'm not sure life in prison is the answer, but it does make sense that repeated aggressions would be met with stronger negative feedback.
Stealing culturally significant items from the public like this case is more similar to graft or corruption, or breach of fiduciary duty. White collar crime. Far from victimless, it hurts everyone.
I think the main reason the US throws people in prison for extended periods for petty crimes is if those crimes were repeat offences - so you have ridiculous situations where people serve years behind bars for stealing toothpaste.
This case is kind of odd though, as the perpetrator committed the same crime many times over a quarter of a century. The items stolen were also of great cultural value. So here we have a person who has repeatedly stolen cultural items, yet they get a very lenient sentence - I very much doubt the sentence would have been the same had he been a black man from a working class family.
This case really highlights the two-tier legal system that exists in the US.
While the parent is correct that the person robbing a store is very likely using a weapon to do it, they left out that the US uses a rather extreme increasing punishment system for repeat offenders.
People robbing stores, I'd wager, are often repeat offenders. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws over the last few decades have dramatically increased the prison-time durations for those people, even for many lesser/low violence crimes.
This was in my city. It was such a weird story, everyone was acting like there's absolutely nothing that could be done other than a slap on the wrist. I've actually been going to the Caliban bookstore for years and was there around August 2018, and was about to buy an old record but asked an employee about how the case was going, and they told me to get out and never come back. It's just the kind of thing that screams "this should be looked into a little more".
I lived in Oakland for about 10 years and frequented the library and occasionally stopped at Caliban. I am amazed that they are still open! It’s incredible they were able to get away with it for so long, and even more so the lenience if the punishment. The library guy will feel the pain more since he is an older felon with no experience other than the library job. Caliban could survive or rebrand. I guess the fact there aren’t many rare bookstores will be their saving grace.
These rare books are an intellectual heritage. One thing that should be top priority for libraries that have these valuable works is high fidelity digital scans of all their works.
Any location in the world can be subject to man-made or natural destruction. If these collections are digitized and placed online, at least there is a better chance of the knowledge being preserved.
From the description in the article, it sure sounds so. Yet one detail in this story that grabbed me is that for 25 years, apparently not a single person noticed any of these books missing. Were there ZERO people who wanted to have a look at them? Was everybody who wanted to see a book being told it was "under restauration", was satisfied with the explanation and never followed up?
I wonder how much of a library's ancient book collection is just pride of ownership, rather than the opportunity to explore the books themselves.
So much this. In recent years, we had one large library with historic books and one city archive of a 1000 years largely damaged and destroyed by a fire and a building collapse.
These kind of heritage all should be digitized in high-res and put online so that a) all people have access to this heritage and b) the online archives could be easily replicated. If there were just 10 archives for a country like Germany, and all these archives would replicate each other, this would mean a huge level of safety. Add Amazon glacier or something to it, and we have a good chance of preserving this important part of history.
From a security perspective I think this results from a single person being able to act unchecked. Reminds me of the McDonald's game system cheat in which a single person controlled the entire country's game pieces unchecked.
The McDonald's system had ostensible two-person control. It failed because the second person was a woman who could not follow her male partner into the restroom.
The Carnegie Library didn't seem to even have ostensible two-person control.
Agreed. The article describes it as "defense in depth" but then goes on to say that one person held all the keys. That's negligence on the part of the library and their reputation should rightly suffer for it.
> The recipient and re-seller of the stolen books - Schulman - was not only a member of the Antique Books Assoc he had served on its ethics and standards committee.
Not really that shocking... really it's no different than people who regularly attend Church every Sunday yet lie and cheat the rest of the week without batting an eye!
I think people have this internal moral scale where they're okay to sin if they throw a few bucks into the collection plate. So serving on the ethics board might've made him feel okay to cheat.
Sure, stealing is bad; but honestly, don't underpay the person in charge of something so valuable! Besides that, this sounds like extreme negligence on behalf of the library.
I feel bad, but then I remember that Aaron Swartz (created RSS, Markdown, and co-founded Reddit) committed suicide after federal charges would have put him in prison for life for stealing public grant-funded research papers from JSTOR at MIT.
I truly do not care about library theft at this point. Steal it all. There's nothing in their possession more important than a life, especially someone like Aaron, who had done so much good with his before he had even turned 18.
It is not, at all, the same kind of thief or library.
Old books are unique pieces and having them in library make them accesible to the largest number (digitalization being the obvious next step).
Stealing them and selling them to private collectors makes them inacessible to the public.
Academic papers are accesible as pdf provided by editors, they can trivially be copied and shared without making the originals less accesible.
Pirating them makes them more accesible and does not hurt the public (at least this is my belief, editors hold a different position).
Equating libraries that provide a public service with editors that restrict access to knowledge hurts more than it helps.
Reminds me of the director of the royal coin cabinet in Stockholm, Sweden. He sold coins and medals from the museum for a value of 20 million sek (~$2m) through a coin collector/trader from 1997 until a few years ago. He could only be sentenced for selling 10% of those coin because of lack of evidence.
I don't want these two dingdongs to rot in prison; I want our justice system to treat all criminals proportionally.