Making the Punishment Fit the Crime

Here's a news story about gun self-defense where the victims went one better than just taking the burglar into custody. From October 19, 2007 Associated Press:

A burglar in Montgomery chose the wrong family to mess with, literally. Adrian and Tiffany McKinnon returned home on Tuesday after a week away to find that thieves had emptied almost everything the family of five owned, Tiffany McKinnon said through tears.

''Tears just rolled down my face as I walked in and saw everything gone and piles of trash all over my home,'' she said.

Adrian McKinnon sent his wife to see her sister while he inspected the piles left behind. As he walked back into the sunroom, a man walked through the back door straight into him, Tiffany McKinnon told the Montgomery Advertiser in a story Thursday.

''My husband Adrian caught the thief red-handed in our home,'' she said. ''And what is even crazier, the man even had my husband's hat sitting right on his head.''

Adrian McKinnon held the suspect, 33-year-old Tajuan Bullock, at gunpoint and told him to sit on the floor until he decided what to do.

''We made this man clean up all the mess he made, piles of stuff, he had thrown out of my drawers and cabinets onto the floor,'' Tiffany McKinnon said.

When police arrived, Bullock complained about being forced to clean the home at gunpoint.

''This man had the nerve to raise sand about us making him clean up the mess he made in my house,'' she said. ''The police officer laughed at him when he complained and said anybody else would have shot him dead.''

I was burglarized once in California. The burglar really didn't make much of a mess, but I felt terribly, terribly violated nonetheless. More typically, burglars are in a big hurry to find valuables and aren't very careful about how they search for them.

This tendency to leave huge messes may also reflect the chemically altered state of the burglars. A fair number of burglars are intoxicated, probably because it reduces inhibitions enough for them to engage in what is, after all, a pretty risky behavior. I remember reading in the early 1980s about a study of heroin addicts in Baltimore that discovered that they were disproportionately committing burglaries and robberies after they had shot up--rather than when they were desperate for a fix. One of my wife's classmates in high school was beaten to death with a roofing hammer by two burglars. They were high on heroin, and had already raped and murdered his little sister, who got home earlier.

There is also sometimes an element of intimidation. I've read of burglars defecating in the middle of the living room as a way of telling the victims, "I'm not afraid. And I can do with your property as I wish." I sometimes suspect that the burglar who broke into my apartment in Santa Monica may have a similar motivation for making a corned beef sandwich while he was there--just to let me know that he had the time and was sufficiently unafraid to do so.