It’s an unfortunate fact of life, but crime does pay unless you get caught. So the idea of paying criminals not to commit crimes, or to turn in the guns that elevate almost any crime, is a good one — even if admitting it tends to hurt a bit.

Criminals and residents in violent-prone neighborhoods should turn in illegal guns because it’s the right thing to do — one of the best ways to ensure their safety as well as the safety of others — not because it will help them buy a fancy pair of sneakers. But as the city of Schenectady found out this spring, a gun amnesty program without a financial incentive doesn’t work very well. (In nearly three months, police collected but seven handguns, and they were all from the same person and all legal.)

By contrast, in Albany, after the shooting death of 10-year-old Kathina Thomas this spring, a buyback program run by the Victory Christian Church’s Rev. Charles Muller, offering a $100 Crossgates Mall gift card as an incentive, has gotten 60 guns off the streets. Were these guns that would have been used in the commission of crimes? It’s impossible to say. It’s also impossible to say that, if they were such guns, the people who would have used them haven’t simply found others.

But one thing’s for sure: The fewer guns there are floating around a neighborhood — and the gun allegedly used in the Thomas girl’s shooting was just such a gun — and the tougher it is for criminals to get their hands on a gun, the less they’re likely to use them in a crime.

So bravo to the Albany County Legislature, which has decided to reload Rev. Muller’s program with $10,000. Good for the Schenectady Police Department, too, in deciding to put a chunk of its state Operation Impact money where its mouth is, implementing a $100-a-gun buyback plan last month.