Why Won’t California Put Repeated Shoplifters in Prison?

I had a conversation not long ago with a family member who’d spent some time dealing with aging adults. One of the things she described that stuck with me was that for some aging people who are facing increasing health issues there is a real sense that they don’t seem able to recognize cause and effect. If, for instance, they eat poorly and wind up in the hospital, it always seems to come as a surprise. Maybe it is a surprise the first time but then they get warned by a doctor and their relatives what not to do and yet a few weeks or months later they go right back to making themselves ill. It’s not incompetence, the older folks in question are still mentally with it in other areas, and it’s not stubbornness exactly either. It’s more like they can’t see the role they are playing in their own repeated downfall.

I thought of that conversation today when I read this story about a shoplifter in San Francisco. How long have I been writing blog posts about shoplifters in San Francisco and other west coast cities? It has been many years at this point and still the city is facing some of the same problems involving the same groups of people. [emphasis added]

Over seven months, Neil Peck became infamous among workers at Target at San Francisco’s Metreon mall.

Known as a “top offender” among the store’s asset protection workers, Peck allegedly went on a  six-month shoplifting spree starting in November 2024, stealing more than $8,000 in merchandise over 17 occasions  before being arrested in May 2025, according to court records.

The Target shoplifting spree was far from Peck’s first brush with California’s criminal justice system. The 49-year-old from Redding has racked up 24 criminal convictions since he was 17, eight of them for theft from CVS, Walgreens, and other stores. Yet an examination of his three-decade criminal history reveals a mind-numbing pattern of catch and release, in which Peck is let out of jail while his cases wend through the system, only to fail to appear in court when ordered, prompting his rearrest. He is ordered to accept mental health treatment while on probation but never does. He has never been to prison, according to state records.

It’s the same pattern over and over since this kid was a teenager. And it just played out again over the past two months: [emphasis added]

For his latest Target theft case, Peck pleaded guilty June 17 to two of 17 charges he faces: shoplifting with two or more priors and attempted grand theft, both felonies. 

During the plea change hearing that day, judge Patrick Thompson said he intended to sentence Peck to two years of probation with ankle monitoring, order him to participate in a residential treatment program, and pay Target $7,848.86 in restitution…

After he was released and told to reappear for sentencing July 17, Peck was ordered to report to St. Anthony’s Father Alfred Center on 10th Street to enroll in residential drug treatment. Less than a week later, he ditched the program. A bench warrant was issued for his arrest, and he was booked into jail July 31. 

Here’s the line that really grabbed my attention: “This was the 16th time he’d failed to appear in court, after being released from custody two dozen times in the course of seven criminal cases.”

Released 24 times and failed to show up 16 times. That’s not just a problem with Neil Peck. That’s a problem with the judges, defense lawyers and prosecutors that keeps doubling down on failure. The pattern at this point should be pretty clear to any professional with half a brain. This guy is not going to mandatory treatment. He is not showing up for the next court date. He is going right back to stealing more stuff and that is all.

As I said, this is not new. Back in 2019 another west coast blue city, Seattle, put out a report noting that the top 100 frequent fliers in the city were responsible for an incredible number of arrests and wasted time. The report was called “System Failure.”

A substantial portion of the criminal activity that has the greatest impact on Seattle’s busiest neighborhoods is committed by prolific offenders who are well known to Seattle police officers and have a large number of criminal cases in Seattle and King County courts. For many of these individuals, that means 10 or more bookings into jail in the past year and 50 or more criminal cases over a multi-year span. These individuals cycle through the criminal justice system with little impact on their behavior, repeatedly returning to Seattle’s streets to commit more crimes.    

Sound familiar? That was six years ago and it was big news at the time. I’d be wiling to bet people in San Francisco heard about it. But here we are and they are just now catching on to the same problem in the form of Neil Peck.

The rest of the story is a long and tiresome rehearsal of the reasons Neil Peck has fallen through the cracks of they existing system. It’s the usual debate between those arguing some people should be placed in treatment whether they like it or not and other saying that might be harmful to civil liberties. 

Finally, there is an admission, sort of, that putting Peck in prison is better than the current cycle of doing nothing.

Andrea Crider, a staff attorney at UC Berkeley’s Criminal Law and Justice Center, said diversion programs are more effective than incarceration. But she noted that there are big holes in such programs, which are meant as alternatives to prison, particularly for people who are mentally ill…

Crider acknowledged that incarceration can help connect people to treatment, but jails and prisons are primarily concerned with monitoring inmates and ensuring they are taking medication prescribed while in custody. 

Notice that her focus seems entirely on what’s best for Neil Peck. But what about what’s best for everyone else? Part of the point of incarceration is to keep criminals off the street where they can commit more crimes. So even if prison doesn’t fix the problem permanently, it does fix part of the problem temporarily. In this case, sending Peck to prison for two years will ensure he doesn’t shoplift from one particular Target store in San Francisco 67 more times during those two years. 

And that’s not nothing.

And maybe the unpleasant experience of prison will cause Peck to think twice once he gets out. Clearly the path of diversion and treatment is accomplishing nothing. Someone in the system needs to connect cause and effect here. It’s time to do something else.