another side to this is who buys the stolen goods?
a friend and I had our cameras stolen in BC once, the RCMP explained that it looked like they were pros and that the cameras were probably already on their way to a warehouse from which they would be sold on ebay! he told me of raids they had done were they found highly organized outfits with tens of thousands of items which they 'fenced' on ebay. after that I refuse to be involved with any 'great' deal on the internet and check the source of anything to make sure it is legit.
I also have a dear friend whose nephew is a crack addict, he has been in and out of jail for years, keeps trying to pull his life together but it's hard. a basically good guy trashing his life and leaving a wide wake. lots of burglaries etc, and he learned these skills in our criminal education system (prison). so the prison wasn't so much a deterrent as a place to learn how to be really bad. it's a quandary, I wouldn't want his hands cut off, and in a sense our system taught him to be bad, but he and others need to be stopped. I don't know maybe if early on he lost a hand he might have gained his life? obviously cutting off limbs is not acceptable but we need to do something different. and as it is in major metropolitan areas burglaries are treated like traffic tickets and that is dead wrong.
as for luxury items, these people also had many other personal items stolen, sounds like they were in the midst of a move and some gang used a moving truck on their new home. the really worst part is the sense of violation.
so we should all think about being absolutely sure we aren't inadvertently supporting this kind of criminal behavior and we need to think deeply about what needs to really change in out society to prevent this help keep people from becoming these kind of foul criminals.