Sounds like that lady needs care more than she needs more prison time. Particularly after a 16 month sentence and the petty nature of the actual crime.
Incidents like these get in the national press precisely because they are rare and hence interesting. Do you think there are tens of people, hundred of people or thousands of people with >100 criminal convictions?
In Germany, that would Intensivtäter (literally intensive perpetrators). It's not rare to have young men with dozens of convictions for assault, breaking and entering, mugging etc. They typically don't get any jail time and will collect more indictments between being arrested and seeing a judge. For Berlin they're having a list of 500 people, almost all male.
The same is true in The Netherlands. Often these individuals share the same backgrounds: (illegal) immigrants from North Africa, mainly Morocco and Algeria. Countries that The Netherlands regard as safe, which means these individuals can’t get a refugee status. In case of Morocco, from my understanding, Morocco isn’t interested in accepting their former subjects [0], so it’s impossible for The Netherlands to send these repeat offenders back.
Western Europe did pretty much that for hundreds of years.
> Through its monopoly on violence, the State tends to pacify social relations.
Such pacification proceeded slowly in Western Europe between the 5th and 11th centuries,
being hindered by the rudimentary nature of law enforcement, the belief in a man’s right to
settle personal disputes as he saw fit, and the Church’s opposition to the death penalty.
These hindrances began to dissolve in the 11th century with a consensus by Church and
State that the wicked should be punished so that the good may live in peace. Courts
imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were
condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just
as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial.
Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th. The pool of
violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy,
intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to
harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be,
however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.
Incidents like these get in the national press precisely because they are rare and hence interesting. Do you think there are tens of people, hundred of people or thousands of people with >100 criminal convictions?