13 Worst States To Be A Burglar

[Onkel Neal]

Hey, I'm pretty ticked off, I thought Texas would have been one of them, if not #1

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By now, you hopefully know how important it is to protect yourself, your apartment, and your possessions from burglary. But do you know how the law is protecting you? Did you know burglars can get life in prison for theft in South Carolina? Or that if a burglar is "a known boxer" in Pennsylvania, their fists count as a lethal weapon? We searched through data on residential burglary to come up with a list of the 13 states with the toughest burglary penalties in America. The effects of being tough on thieves might surprise you.

We scoped legislative codes in all fifty states (and DC) to find maximum and minimum burglary sentences and fines, then searched through actual prison population data to find out how long the average burglar really spends in jail. We factored in Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws, which allow homeowners and apartment-dwellers to protect themselves with deadly force in the event of a burglary.

Want to know whether your state is one of the ones that's hardest on burglars? The 13 toughest states for residential burglary, in order of maximum time and fines, are: Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama, Montana, District of Columbia, Kentucky, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Florida, Tennessee, Illinois, and Maine. The average minimum sentence in these states is 2.5 years, while the rest of the country averages under a year for burglary offenses. In fact, in South Carolina and Virginia, thieves can get locked up for life, and Alabama has a maximum of 100 years behind bars.