Copper Theft Caught on Video News Report

If a copper thief causes $50,000 damage, they should be required to either pay $50,000 or do $50,000 worth of work to pay for it. And people would not be so willing to steal if they had to pay for it with more than jail time. Jail is, as you admit, too nice.

think about what has to go wrong in your life before you start to steal copper. i was doing it for a few months while homeless to get back on my feet. jail will do nothing to the copper theif, i would have been glad to go sleep in a bed down at the jail no problem... the jail was right next to a construction site and when i got out i was going to go straight over to the construction site to steal more copper.

Copper thievery didn't used to be such a problem. Copper is too expensive - we need to be mining more of it, rather than let the price go out of hand. We also need to catch these thieves and make them pay for the damage they cause!

Copper theft is indeed a *very* serious crime. My stepfather of 25 years--Earl Thelander of Onawa, IA--was killed in an explosion after copper thieves stripped propane gas lines from my folks' rural rental property and let the house fill with gas. While other states pass strict scrap metal sales laws, Iowa--the only state where an innocent victim lost his life--let House Study Bill 660 die. The irony is tragic beyond comprehension. Copper thieves steal more than copper. They steal lives.