Should porch pirates go to prison? Some states say yes

(NewsNation) — In an effort to crack down on package thieves, some states are prosecuting so-called “porch piracy” as a felony, but critics say harsher penalties won’t yield better results.

Deciding how to punish the crime has launched debates over the deterrence power of lengthy sentences, racial profiling, privacy and how to best leverage law enforcement in communities where resources are already stretched thin.

Nationwide, nearly one in five Americans reported having a delivery stolen in the past three months, according to Security.org’s 2023 Package Theft Annual Report, and thieves stole an estimated $8 billion in packages.

Stealing USPS mail or packages is already a federal crime, but the potential punishment for stealing a package from private delivery services varies by state. Texas, Michigan, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia, New Jersey and Kentucky all have elevated package theft from a misdemeanor to a felony.

Maximum prison sentences range from five to 10 years, depending on the state. In Texas, stealing packages is a state felony with a maximum sentence of a decade, and penalties can be increased if the victim is disabled or elderly. In Georgia, package theft is a felony if the offender takes three or more parcels from one address or 10 packages from three or more homes.

Those in favor of harsher penalties say they act as a deterrent against crime, though critics dispute that point. In Pennsylvania, lawmakers considered a change in law this summer to crack down on repeat offenders.

“We must give constant attention to making sure that emerging forms of criminal activity can be prosecuted and penalized. With the growth in online shopping, the crime of porch pirating has quickly spread,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lisa Baker (R) told NewsNation affiliate WHTM.

The State Senate passed the bill, and it’s been referred to the House.

While some states are trying to crack down on criminals to curb the behavior, the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice found that increasing the severity of punishment “does little to deter crime … partly because criminals know little about the sanctions for specific crimes.”

Package theft usually falls under another crime like larceny-theft. Creating a separate law to tackle the issue, then, may send a message of its own, said Wayne Logan, a Steven M. Goldstein professor of law at Florida State University.

“If a jurisdiction is singling out this particular behavior for criminal culpability, that expresses particular condemnation of it,” he said.

However, the value of those stolen items could complicate porch piracy punishments.

Theft can be prosecuted differently depending on how much the stolen item was worth, explained Rebecca Edwards, a writer who analyzes package theft reports and trends for SafeWise.

“That’s the way we’re used to prosecuting larceny-theft,” she said. “Things are escalated to large caps when they hit a certain value amount, so they’re looking at lowering that threshold for package theft crimes because it’s so pervasive.”

Porch piracy is usually a crime of opportunity, meaning thieves don’t always know what they’re stealing or its value, making prosecuting package thefts uniformly a challenge, Edwards said.

“Are you taking my $12 costume jewelry I ordered for Halloween or are you taking grandma’s cremains?” she said. “That’s why it’s so hard to blanket it into one law.”

Additionally, some argue the payoff isn’t worth the allocation of resources to investigate and prosecute package thefts.

Even in instances where thefts have been caught on doorbell cameras, tracking a suspect down isn’t a guarantee, and use of the technology has been criticized as leading to racial profiling.

In 2019, reporters for Motherboard reviewed more than 100 user-submitted posts in the Ring Neighbors app and found most people who were reported as “suspicious” were people of color. 

Eyewitness identifications aren’t always reliable, either. As many as one in four stranger eyewitness identifications are wrong, and the practice is one of the leading causes behind wrongful convictions, according to the California Innocence Project.

Victims are also more likely to contact the retailer or delivery service over law enforcement, according to the Security.org report.

The majority of people, 64%, reported the theft to the store or company they purchased the items from, while 54% reported it to the delivery company. Significantly fewer people, 15%, said they reported the situation to police.

Rather than elevating the punishment for larceny, some lawmakers have suggested instead relying on cameras and lock boxes to deter theft.

“That might be one intervention,” Logan said. “But then again, do you expect people in houses and apartments to have to pay for that? It’s not free.”

The right solution will “find a way to work with all the moving parts,” Edwards said.

In the meantime, there is some good news: Package theft could be on the decline.

About 5% fewer people than last year reported having a package stolen in the past 12 months, according to SafeWise’s most recent polling.

It’s harder to measure whether laws ensuring harsher sentencing have paid off. Package theft isn’t something government agencies track in a reliable way. The offense often falls under another crime such as larceny or theft, arrests for which have been on a mostly downward trend over the past decade.

There were 493,827 larceny arrests reported in 2022 — almost a 30% increase from the previous year but fewer than every other year in the past decade, according to FBI crime data.

Compared to 2012, last year’s larceny arrests were down nearly 54%.

NewsNation producer Marty Hobe contributed to this report.