Jesse Leonardo Otero, 44, has been arrested 90 times for shoplifting in the Bay area of California, most recently this month. He is a drug addict, homeless, and supports himself by shoplifting and selling stolen property, often stealing from the same stores over and over again. He doesn’t discriminate, though, targeting small businesses, big-box stores, or whatever seems convenient at the time. He isn’t just lifting candy bars: when Jesse steals, it’s usually hundreds of dollars of merchandise at a time. Local police and store managers know him by name. The manager of Five Little Monkeys toy store in Albany, California, for example, says she has reported Otero to police more than 20 times. Jesse ranged far and wide in his shopping trips, and is an expert on the BART transit system, which he uses to hit stores at every stop.

Nobody has kept count of the number of days Jesse has spend in jail for his exploits, but it isn’t very many. The usual routine is that police give Otero a citation and release him. Sometimes, as with this month’s arrest, he is arrested and jailed for a short time, then let out of jail free, just like in Monopoly. All of this ridiculous pattern is due to California voters, in their wisdom, passing a law in 2014 that weakened penalties for everything Jesse does, like illicit drug use, vagrancy, petty theft, and shoplifting. Prosecutors now can’t file a felony shoplifting charge unless the items taken top $950 in value.

Multiply Jesse by several hundred (or thousands?) and you can understand why so many stores in California are experiencing ruinous shoplifting. Social justice warriors, advocates of “restorative justice” and those who regard the fact that a disproportionate number of those in prison are black as proof of systemic racism dispute the validity of the “Broken Windows” theory, but California’s experience is one more bit of significant evidence that the theory is sound.

Coined in 1982 by social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling, the theory posits that broken windows left visibly unrepaired in a neighborhood will eventually lead to many more windows being broken because the sight creates a signal that no one cares, and that the culture of the society regards broken windows as tolerable and not worth addressing. Institutionalized disorder follows, levels of fear and apathy increase, and vital cultural social norms deteriorate and disappear. The windows, of course, are just symbolic: the culture-rotting phenomena can be visible homelessness, panhandling, uncivil public behavior and speech, public urination and defecation, other openly anti-social conduct, and, as in Jesse’s case, unpunished crime. All of the forgoing describe rampant conditions in California, and not coincidentally. The culture of the state has adopted a series of delusional progressive policies, and allowing the Jesse Oteros to roam free is just one of them.

The theory is that Jesse’s not hurting anyone, but he is, and one doesn’t even have to include the Broken Windows effect to conclude that. It costs money to arrest and process him, and his thefts harm law-abiding businesses and lead to an increase in prices. Those, on turn, harm the most vulnerable in society.

Locking Jesse up is also expensive, though it keeps him from stealing for a while. How should society deal with a resolute and incorrigible lawbreaker? Surely some kind of cumulative accountability should kick in after 90 thefts. It would never happen, but I would like to see Jesse face banishment from the woke Golden State after a certain number of arrests, with the consequences including relocation to a city and state that still believe that laws should be obeyed and criminals should be punished. My father once half-seriously argued that the ancient practice of declaring repeat offenders as “outlaws” had utility: the criminal would be declared uncovered by the society’s laws he or she refused to respect, and thereafter would have no protection from them.

You can imagine what Dirty Harry could do under such a system.

As Richard Nixon memorably said, “But that would be wrong.” There is no way to stop scofflaws like Jesse, especially when the public’s judgment has been as warped by leftist indoctrination as it has in California. At very least he can and should be used as a vivid example of what ideology unmoored from reality and common sense will eventually create.