she doesn't see the need for them and thinks the locks in the doorknobs are good enough. Growing up as I did in a major city, every house had at least one deadbolt, if not more. In her small town, the doors were very rarely locked at all.
While it was great growing up with that innocence and idyllic setting, one is only innocent and idyllic until something happens to
rob us of that.
I grew up in such a small town. Then one day, in the middle of the afternoon, the neighbor's house was robbed. The wife came home from shopping and found the door ajar and the parts of the house she could see were ransacked.
It was the time, way before cellphones. The landline phone in the house was luckily near the door. Upset, she called her husband at work. He, and co-workers overhearing the conversation, yelled for her to get out of the house as the intruder(s) could still be in there. To get back in the car, lock the car doors and drive to the street, while he called the police and came home.
Luckily there was no intruder inside. The house was rummaged through, especially their bedroom. The thieves took many things from the house and especially from the master bedroom. The neighbors felt extremely violated. Their sense of safety was gone. Also gone was the innocence and idea that they lived in a safe, idyllic neighborhood where things like that didn't happen.
The police said everyone thinks that until it happens to them. That a simple deadbolt would have deterred the thieves who would have moved on to the next easy target. That it's a TV show myth that most thieves break in at night and prowl around while the owners are at home and sleeping. Why would a thief go in and risk a confrontation if the owners woke up? That the majority of household burglaries happen during the day, when the owners and the neighbors are at work, so there are no witnesses. They prefer houses they can get into easily, with no deadbolts. They don't like to break windows and get in that way, as the sound of glass breaking carries and that may attract neighbors who call the police.
The wife, who had already been a bit paranoid and agoraphobic was never the same after that. Being the first to come upon the scene, being told the intruders could still be inside with her, that they walked and rummaged though the master bedroom, robbed her of more than physical possessions. The incident became a turning point where she markedly emotionally declined after that and became increasingly more agoraphobic and felt unsafe.
She was no longer even safe in her own home. Even after deadbolt locks were put on all the doors, she never lost that feeling that she was not safe anywhere.
A basic deadbolt from Home Depot is about $40-$60. It's worth it to secure your wife's innocence by putting them on the doors. Even if she doesn't engage the locks, thieves seeing them on the outside of doors will likely make them move onto the next house instead of taking the 50% chance that it might be unlocked. . . unless your wife also doesn't lock the doorknobs.
(Here in NYC, I have a top-of-the-line Medico brand deadbolt lock. The cylinder part of the lock alone is $99, which most of us change when moving into a new apartment. It is pick-proof and basically drill-proof, certainly drill-proof enough that thieves don't want to take the extra 20 minutes drilling through, and the noise, when they could be in and out of another place already.)
