> Several years later I had someone crawl under my truck, cut the fuel line, and after taking all the gas they could get using a piece of tape to try and hold it back in place (I actually had this in my Facebook memories yesterday), a car alarm may have alerted me to that.
Holy cow, US really is a bizzare place. With your level of wages and your low prices of gas, the value of the gas stolen was an equivalent of 2-4 hours of minimum wage labor? And yet someone went through this trouble and risked jail for it.
I think you are way over estimating the level of prosperity of the poor throughout the US. There are people around me that live in literal garden shed shacks built with scavenged construction scraps and garbage. Go into big cities and look at how many people live on the streets.
I've also had something similar happen to me. When I was a university student staying at the campus dorms, I'd park my car outside my dorm building for most weekdays until I'd use it on the weekends to drive home, run errands across town, etc. Once when I came back to my car after a week of it being parked it was totally dead and reeked of gasoline - someone had snuck under my car, drilled into my gas tank, and drained the fuel into a gas can below. Getting the gas tank replaced was about USD$1,200 worth of damages and I doubt the campus police ever tracked down the person that did it.
However, the circumstances were probably different than most gas thefts. This took place during the winter in a place known for brutally cold winters, so if you're living in your car then having gas is the difference between freezing to death or not. Apparently it was not that uncommon, the campus police seemed like they were dealing with a pattern of these kinds of thefts.
It's really not a lot of trouble - and, presumably, the perpetrator may not be able to easily get a job for a variety of reasons - such as prior felonies, untreated mental health issues, etc - and for those same reasons, likely doesn't care too much about the fact they're risking further jail.
No disrespect in the slightest - but you're thinking into it too much, haha. Things like this are very common in the MidWest/South and such. US is quite a bit of a shithole for some, sad reality. Life is often cold and hard in general though.
Holy cow, US really is a bizzare place. With your level of wages and your low prices of gas, the value of the gas stolen was an equivalent of 2-4 hours of minimum wage labor? And yet someone went through this trouble and risked jail for it.