And how much did this investigation cost, when you account for all the hours spent by investigators, lawers, judges, etc?

My guess is it was a huge net loss for the taxpayer.

The more effective move for the nation would have been for this guys boss to have confronted him and said "computer parts keep going missing on your shift. You have 2 weeks to make sure all the computers are back to their exact original config or we're gonna investigate and you could end up in prison".

It’s obviously not about the cost of the parts, there just can’t be any tolerance for criminal conduct in government agency employees.

Sure, that'd be more "cost efficient", and for a small one-off, probably better. But law enforcement and justice is not a profit center.

Merely making the threats like you specify and even having it restored encourages more crime by making the crime effectively zero-risk — either he gets away with it, or simply needs to restore things to the way they were and the only cost to the criminal is the wasted effort. Makes it so crime pays.

And no, the investigation of watching a bunch of videos to observe the perp opening the computer cases, and writing up a complaint, is probably lower cost than the multiple thefts.

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