Index Theft Categories to Inflation

I found this on another blog and wanted to share it with you, it's pretty interesting:

In 1993, Texas set the current threshold for felony theft at $1,500 for a state jail felony - below that, theft receives misdemeanor charges that don't involve state prison time. The jump to the next offense category is quite significant - someone must steal more than $20,000 to be charged with a third degree felony.However, adjusting for inflation, $1,500 in 1993 amounts to $2,208 in today's dollars. Indeed, "if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2008 and 1993, they would cost you $1500 and $1026.91 respectively." So over time, less serious thefts have come to be categorized as felonies that would have been misdemeanors at the time the law established the current threshold.That's both unfair to defendants - who may receive different punishments for comparable offenses - and also results in an incremental boost in the incarceration rate over time as less serious thefts become felonies.Why not index theft levels to to the Consumer Price Index and have it adjusted automatically every year instead of changing it every couple of decades when the Legislature gets around to it? That would make more sense both from an equal protection standpoint and from the perspective of fiscal austerity, limiting expensive incarceration in state prisons to thieves whose crimes would have fit the definition of felony theft at the time it was defined by the Legislature.

Link: http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2010/02/index-theft-categories-to-inflation.html