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Amsterdam offers crooks free ride home
The City of Amsterdam is making small-time crooks an offer that even a mafia don would find hard to refuse: free bus tickets home instead of jail time. There is a catch: ?These are one-way tickets,?? says police spokesman Ebe van der Land. He says around 50 repeat offenders born elsewhere in Europe have accepted the deal.
The idea combines Dutch pragmatism, consensus-building and penny-pinching. Politicians, police and social services decided to try it after looking at the financial burden ?revolving-door criminals?? put on the system ? and their victims. ?What does it cost to replace a single wallet??? Van der Land says. ?A bus ticket across Europe costs euro58 (US$86).?? He said Friday that criminals see it as a chance to get home and escape a cycle of theft and arrest.
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