This won’t happen to you. So try to imagine. Your wife or minor child needs medicine—they’re sick, weak. They’re not eating and are dehydrated. You can’t afford to go to the doctor and you can’t get prescription drugs. But you need something to help them get better. So you go to the local drug store, take a large amount of drugs and a bunch of other products that will help them, and bury them under your clothes. Make no mistake, you “took” them because you simply can’t afford them. But as you get to the checkout counter you have a change of heart and want to return the drugs to their shelves, but it’s too late. A store security guard grabs and detains you and calls the police who arrest you. And maybe you’ve taken something far more expensive too.

Your $300 theft is a misdemeanor, and your potential jail sentence is one year imprisonment. A $1,200 theft, assuming it got that high, is a Class E felony, and you face a possible four years in jail (for which you could serve as much as 2/3 of that time). You have no job and, along with your family, you lack roots in the community where you “live”—if you can call it that.