What Punishments Were There for Those Who Stole in History?

Throughout history, people have committed many crimes.

Of course, there have been people who have been falsely accused of committing crimes, but there have also been many people who actually committed crimes.

I think the most common of these crimes is theft.

I mean, I think the most popular crime was stealing.

You work hard and make something, and then someone comes and steals what you worked hard for. In a sense, they steal your labor. It's not possible, of course.

There are also people like Robin Hood who steal from the king or the rich and distribute it to the poor people.

Robin Hood is known as a folk hero! His deeds have been the subject of movies.

Speaking of movies, robbery movies are also very popular for some reason. Everyone gets very excited when that safe is opened. 

There's either a diamond or something valuable in the safe, and most of the time there's a lot of money.

In some movies, the thieves are wild west characters dressed as bandits.

Or it could be a beautiful woman who robs the safe.

In the darkness of the night, the cat girl, or whatever she was, would come silently with acrobatic movements, rob the safe and disappear just as silently in the darkness of the night.

Yes, night time is usually the working time for thieves.

But I wondered how thieves have been punished throughout history?

After all, it is not a nice thing to do. They should be punished!

I remember from cowboy movies that in the American West, the punishment for stealing horses and cattle was once hanging from a rope.

With two witnesses you could hang whoever you wanted back then. The wild west was a time with its own rules.

where gunslingers and outlaws roamed.

So horses and cattle were very important in the wild west.

In Islam, the punishment for stealing is as harsh as in the wild west.

According to Sharia law, they do not hang the thief, but they cut off whichever hand you stole with. The arm cut off by Sharia does not hurt!

That's why there used to be a lot of handicapped people walking around.

They were not seen as handicapped like today.

Because it was known that if he was a handicapped person, he stole something and became handicapped. What crime they committed would be known for the rest of their lives.

Today, a person who commits simple theft is sentenced to imprisonment from 1 year to 3 years. If a qualified form of theft is committed, the penalty is 3 to 7 years in prison, as far as I know.

Oh how nice, the state says steal, even if you are a qualified thief, you will serve a maximum of 7 years. Then you are free.

I guess there is also a sentence reduction or something. According to the law of execution, I think you were serving half the sentence.

If that's the case, then the maximum sentence for theft is three and a half years, which will pass in the blink of an eye.

Oh good, at least you won't be hungry in the winter.

I wonder if they feed you well in prison?

I think Hammurabi was right in his time, the first written law in history says that anyone caught will be punished with death.

This means that once upon a time the penalty for theft really was death.

Our ancestors didn't have the soft heart we have today.

There are also the laws of Ashnunna, which also state that the penalty for theft is death, but with one exception.

According to the Ashnunna laws, if what was stolen was a slave, it was enough to return it.

So they said, let's not take a slave's life now for a slave.

They might have thought that there were already too many slaves and they might have gotten mixed up. I think this is similar to the story of when the Arabs found plenty of oil, slaves were of no value to people once upon a time.

Can you imagine, there was a time when people were literally using people as slaves!

What a savage creature human beings are.

Have you ever seen an animal forcing its own kind to do something as a slave?

It does not even occur to any creature other than human beings to use an animal of another species as a slave.

In fact, we still use other life forms as our slaves.

There are even those of us who enjoy it.

But I think the worst thing is that we once used even our own kind as slaves.

Slavery doesn't really exist in Turkish history. We were a more humane society.

Although I think there were slaves in Ottoman times. Maybe we may have been enthusiastic for a while with the influence of Islam.

Because slavery is even mentioned in the Koran.

So the way of life of the Arabs at that time allowed it.

Isn't it strange? There were slaves even in the time of the Prophet.

Today, even though slavery has been officially abolished, the modern slavery system still continues.

Of course, this is not the subject of this article, so let me congratulate my laborer brothers and sisters once again on the past holiday and let me go back to the subject of theft.

For example, the Assyrians imprisoned those who stole.

This means that in the past, the punishment for every thief was not death.

In fact, we see different practices in the western world.

In Europe, before the Middle Ages, if a slave committed theft, he could be sentenced to death, but if a non-slave committed theft, he could be sentenced to live the rest of his life as a slave.

By the way, in some places in Europe, it was also possible for a caught thief to pay double the amount of what he stole as a punishment.

It actually depends on the situation, I understand.

In some places, a thief caught red-handed is probably at the mercy of his captor.

If the captor didn't kill the thief at that moment, sometimes this penalty could be increased up to 4 or 5 times.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, theft was punished even more severely than murder.

In the Germanic peoples of Narbonnaise in 798 AD, for example, the penalty for murder was a small amount of money, while the penalty for theft was death.

It is written on the internet that in the Franks, if the thief was a slave, the owner paid a monetary reward, while the slave suffered physical punishment for the theft, such as flogging.

For example, among the Burgundians (a large East Germanic tribe living in Germania during the Roman Empire), theft was not very important.

But if it was a falcon (a bird of prey!), then it was a different matter, the punishment for theft was that the falcon would peck the thief's chest until it tore 150 grams of meat from the thief's chest.

The Saxons (Germanic people living in central and northern Germany since the times of the Roman Empire) The punishment for the thief was to pay a certain price to the king, the treasury, and to pay 9 times the price of what he stole to the person he stole from.

In short, as far as I understand throughout history, theft was the most common crime and for some reason, people never stopped stealing, even if the punishment was a very severe punishment such as death.

Even if the punishment is as severe as death or amputation, even if it is tarred and feathered with chicken feathers and made to walk around to shame them, or even if the punishment is as light as cutting their hair and making them feel ashamed, human beings do not give up, they steal whenever they find the opportunity.

There must be a reason for this, but I will not go into the reasons for stealing in this article.

Nowadays, very modern methods of theft have been developed.

The most common method is theft by the state.

You don't realize it, but before you know it, the money in your pocket is no longer the money it once was. It's not as valuable as it once was!

It's as if they stole some of it!

You go to the bazaar, to the market, you can hardly buy anything with the money in your pocket.

They call this inflation in the modern world, but this is also theft. And it is theft by the state.

Let's call inflation outright theft, modern theft!

That's why we call it a monster, that's why we are wrong when we say monster, inflation is a thief!

In other words, I don't think inflation is a thief, but those who steal the money in our pockets through criminal inflation are thieves. Those who do not prevent it are thieves, those who fuel inflation are thieves!

Maybe we should increase the penalties for theft, as we once did. Would it do any good to increase the penalties?

I don't want to go into other modern methods of theft, we won't be able to get out of it once we do. Even legal methods such as tax evasion and tax avoidance are theft in my opinion.

In short, I wanted you to know that in history, the penalty for theft was even more severe than manslaughter.

In our penal code, for some reason, we have kept the penalty for theft very low.

Maybe that's why there are so many thieves, maybe they think that the penalty is so low, they can just go to jail and get out.

By the way, take care of your votes, there are many thieves around, the penalty for theft is very low and as far as I know, there is not even a penalty for vote theft.

Even if you catch someone, I have never come across anyone who has been punished for stealing votes.

The horse crosses Üsküdar, that's all!

In short, those who steal, or those who are eager to steal, I wanted you to know that the opposition says we are coming to bring you down by the nose!

By the way, I think we really need to increase the penalties for theft.

I don't know if it will work, but if the penalties are a little more severe, at least it might make the thieves think a little more.

Love and respect to everyone from Moscow