The Steal (22 page)

In his oral argument for Andrade, Erwin Chemerinsky, the esteemed First Amendment lawyer, contended that giving his client two twenty-five-year sentences was not just “cruel and unusual,” it was “cruel and unique.” No attorney general had ever tried to put a shoplifter in jail for life. Chemerinsky continued, “The State can’t point to even one other person in this history of the United States who has received a sentence of 50 years to life for shoplifting a small amount of merchandise. Even in California this sentence would be regarded as quite—much larger than, say, second-degree murder, manslaughter, rape, which shows that it is a grossly disproportionate punishment.” Ewing’s lawyer also used the word “shoplifting” to contend that his client’s crime did not deserve three strikes. “This still remains shoplifting three golf clubs.”

Some justices did not buy it. “You say the principal focus has to be on the three golf clubs, like we’re some judges out of Victor Hugo or something.... But . . . there’s a long recidivism component here, and that’s the whole purpose of the California law that you’re asking us to ignore, it seems to me,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said, referring to Hugo’s 1862 novel
Les Misérables
, in which Jean Valjean is sentenced to nineteen years in prison after he steals a loaf of bread.

In two 5–4 rulings, the Supreme Court ruled against Andrade and Ewing. In the majority opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that the three strikers’ sentence was proportionate for both men even though Andrade, then thirty-seven, would not be eligible for parole for fifty years. So whereas in Beverly Hills, a jury found a movie star shoplifter guilty of grand larceny and gave her community service, in Washington, the conservative Supreme Court found that two poor shoplifters deserved the twenty-five-to-life sentence they had received in California.

Marc Klaas was in the courtroom at the Ryder trial to show his support for the star who years earlier had donated $200,000 to help him find his daughter. “She may be a double felon, but she has a big heart,” he wrote in a letter to the judge.

“Do you think that we’re damaged people?” Alice, a raven-haired, rail-thin thirtysomething housewife shoplifter with a Bettie Page haircut whispered at dusk one summer day in 2006. Her husband was an attorney. We were sitting on a slate patio outside a mall at the merger of two interstates, a pretty, semirural area of wooded, rolling hills and white-shingled houses. Alice wore cutoff jean shorts, a tank top, and white Keds. Her nickname was tattooed on her biceps. “We would not want to hurt a particular person,” she said, striking a familiar note about shoplifting as a victimless crime. She guiltily confessed to “shop hopping”—an act verging on shoplifting—with her kids. She roamed from PetSmart to the ASPCA, pretending to be in the market for a kitty when all she was doing was encouraging her children to get over their fear of animals. She called shop hopping “the gray area.” Buying a hardcover from Barnes & Noble, reading it, and returning it the next day was equally shameful. Coveting is a prelude to shoplifting, she said. She once opened a hundred boxes of cereal to find a toy for her young son, which she then stole.

Alice led me into the mall, through a door, and up some stairs to a corridor on the second floor. A sign announced that Shoplifters Anonymous was meeting in room 6. Weight Watchers was next door at 9:00 p.m.

Alice closed the door. Inside the small, windowless room, seven women of varying ages, classes, ethnicities, and marital statuses began chanting the Serenity Prayer: a coed in her twenties with long blond hair, a tight sleeveless top, and jeans; an agitated Realtor in her fifties; a Chinese woman with red lacquered nails and a black lacy long-sleeved T-shirt. A woman who had lost a child.

The objects shoplifted included a can of turtle soup, a bottle of cough syrup, a bag of
herbes de Provence
, and a small bottle of black truffle oil. The women admitted temptations unsuccumbed to, such as yearning to “shop and dash” while waiting in an interminable line at Walgreens. Alice vowed to live a shoplifting-free life.

Wasn’t it hard to meet at the mall, I asked?

“I just drive around and around until I find a space right near the room where we are meeting so I won’t be tempted to steal,” said Sandy, who wore a huge diamond ring and came from a family of shoplifters.

What was the difference between shoplifting and other addictions?

“Shoplifting does not let you forget,” said Melinda, a middle-aged woman with Turner syndrome, a chromosomal abnormality that can result in shortness as well as cognitive defects. Melinda had served three months in jail after shoplifting while on probation. Keeping her out of jail was one reason Alice started the group. When the women went around the circle talking about their crimes, Melinda complained that it was hard to find a job once her criminal history had been revealed. She added that shoplifting felt distinct from the emotion alcohol or heroin addicts feel, because it dragged her back to the moment of the arrest. “Memory is a luxury that only those who are straight can afford,” she said.

“I want to feel guilt or shame,” Alice protested.

Shoplifting came late to the self-help movement. One pioneer, Lawrence A. Conner Jr., the postmaster of Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, a small town outside Philadelphia, according to an apocryphal story, started Shoplifters Anonymous in 1977 after a friend could not stop shoplifting. In the golden age of self-help, Conner was the first reformer to connect the uptick in shoplifting with the introduction of self-service in stores, the first to use the phrase “theft addict,” and the first to believe that shoplifters could be rehabilitated. Like drug addicts or alcoholics.

Conner’s 1980 book,
The Shoplifters Are Coming: Don’t Steal This Book,
furthered his aims. Yet at times, his views seem at odds: Conner wanted to draw a sharp line between shoplifters and honest customers and to establish that “shoplifters R us.” He traced the roots of “me generation” shoplifters to the advent of the self-service emporium. He contrasted the tiny corner store, where the grocer handed items from behind the counter to the customer, to the hurly-burly of supermarkets of the 1930s. After World War II, he argued, the vast number of products flooding stores enticed Americans to shoplift. But the former postmaster’s most significant contribution to our conversation is his taxonomy. He divides shoplifters into four categories, the first three of which were already in existence: professionals, kleptomaniacs, and amateurs. The fourth, the shoplifting addict, a phrase of Conner’s invention, refers to Americans who shoplift regularly but do not resell the merchandise. But they are not kleptomaniacs either. Conner rejected the nineteenth-century disease and replaced it with the more palatable—at least in the 1980s—addiction. He predicted that shoplifting addicts would crimp retail industry profits for decades.

In 1988, two years after Conner died, Peter Berlin, a cherubic-looking former Bonwit Teller security executive, bought parts of Shoplifters Anonymous from Conner’s son. Berlin was unable to get a judge to agree to turn Conner’s ideas into a for-profit company that, as the company’s website now puts it, would “create public awareness regarding the root causes of shoplifting.” He had already been obsessed by this goal for a decade, since one person after another he stopped at Bonwit’s “did not know” why they had shoplifted but told heartbreaking stories about their lives.

The following year, Berlin incorporated Shoplifters Anonymous as a not-for-profit company. Three years later, he added an educational arm, Shoplifter’s Alternative, and started a for-fee newsletter,
The Peter Berlin Report on Shrinkage Control
. Today the newsletter, which surveyed antitheft technology as well as all types of retail theft, reported from conferences, and published studies on ethics and employee behavior, no longer exists. But the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention (NASP), evolving out of Berlin’s dream, has become, according to its promotional materials, “the biggest and most reputable organization committed to raising awareness about the hazards of shoplifting.” It serves five hundred communities across the country.

By the time Berlin’s rival, Terrence Shulman, founded Cleptomaniacs and Shoplifters Anonymous (CASA) in 1992 in Detroit, he had shoplifted many times. (He uses the “C” in “cleptomania” because
casa
is the Spanish word for “home.”) Shulman endured his parents’ divorce at age ten. His father was an alcoholic, his mother was a teacher turned long-suffering housewife, and he began stealing at around age eleven. His was first arrested for shoplifting in 1986, when he was twenty-one. He shoplifted chronically throughout law school, stopping when he was twenty-five. Cycling through financial deprivation and heartache, through psychiatrists, medication, and jail, through clinging to sanity and arriving at recovery, Shulman credits many people with helping him recognize his shoplifting addiction. But ultimately, neither a psychiatrist nor a pill was enough to overcome it. That credit goes to the Forum, the motivational organization.

As part of CASA, the self-described “expert” on shoplifting recovery launched a self-help group modeled on the twelve-step program. In 2003, Shulman self-published a book,
Something for Nothing: Shoplifting Addiction and Recovery,
in which he elaborated on the popular understanding of shoplifting, expanding on some academic researchers’ arguments that there are many more kleptomaniacs than we think. Shulman’s contribution was to assert that according to his research, there are many more
shoplifting addicts
than we think.

The following year, Shulman went on
Oprah
. The September 21, 2004, episode, “Living a Secret Life,” presented former governor of New Jersey Jim McGreevey’s confession that, while married, he had been having an affair with a gay male employee. A chronic gambler came on. But shoplifting addiction, which
O
magazine had run a story on in the September issue, was a fresh addition to the show. The shoplifting addicts were Alice, the stay-at-home mom and attorney’s wife, and Shulman.

When Oprah asked him, “Are we calling it a disease?” Shulman, slouching on the butterscotch leather conversation couch, and clasping his hands around his knees, replied, “I’m calling it a disease.” Shulman told Oprah the story of how he first realized that he was sick. Then he confessed that he had recently shoplifted “a piece” of a lamp, although he did not specify whether it was the shade or the stand. Only when his wife chastised him at home did he realize he had “slipped.” Stealing from Oprah’s playbook, he said, “It is the secrets that make us sick.”

After the commercial break, Oprah asked Shulman whether he had returned the “piece” of the lamp.

“I finally took it back this week,” Shulman replied. “I knew I was coming on the show and I wanted good karma.” Oprah’s last words on the show that day, as usual, advocated telling everyone “who you were” even if you had done something bad: “Outing yourself . . . the people who love you will still love you.”

In between Shulman and Oprah sat Alice, wearing a long wig and thick black-rimmed glasses. She confessed that two months earlier, she had been arrested for shoplifting “blue cheese dressing, a small plastic bottle of play bubbles, red wine vinegar, three DVDs, and one VHS tape.” But Alice later complained to me that among those who knew she shoplifted, not all of them had—as the guru from Chicago had promised—loved her. Some of her friends no longer spoke to her.

 

 

In November 2005, Shulman hosted the first International Conference on Theft Addictions and Disorders at the Courtyard Marriott Riverview Hotel and Spa in Detroit. Wednesday night, before the conference began, Shulman invited me to his weekly Theft Addicts group, which that evening met in a nondescript room at Clean House Holistic Treatment Center in Southfield, Michigan, just outside Detroit city limits. Before anyone arrived, Shulman shared his disappointment about the conference. Although he had promoted it, no one from any judicial branch had registered. Nor had anyone from the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention or any security people. He said, “I put out the olive branch. Loss prevention does not like me because I try to play both sides of the issue.”

Shulman meant that while he conceded that shoplifting was a crime, he understood better than most people that it was a pathology too. Shoplifters needed to be punished, but they also needed to be treated. But although Shulman compares CASA’s mission to that of Alcoholics Anonymous, which in the 1970s convinced the public and medical authorities that alcoholism was an illness, whether theft addiction will reach the same acceptance is open to doubt. Neither the Division on Addictions, a center affiliated with Harvard Medical School, nor the National Institute of Mental Health employs a specialist in shoplifting addiction. Christine Reilly, who was until 2009 executive director at the now defunct Institute for Research on Pathological Gambling and Related Disorders, housed at the Division on Addictions, said, “We don’t do theft . . . we deal with substance abuse. But theft is not a substance. You need to call someone who deals with criminals.”

Still, Shulman achieved some success. In the last five years, Shoplifters Anonymous franchises have popped up all over the United States and in Mexico. In 2004, he created the not-for-profit Shulman Center for Compulsive Theft and Spending, and he is now developing a trademarked treatment process, the Shulman Method. Shulman’s book and his website, filled with stories of despair and recovery, stand as testimony to these methods. By subsuming his life into his work, he has parlayed his authentic wound into a self-help typhoon. On
Oprah
,
48 Hours
,
Fox Files
,
Inside Edition
,
Extra!
, the
Today
show,
The Early Show
,
Ricki Lake
,
Queen Latifah
, the Discovery Channel, at conferences on addiction, he sells inspirational talks. He consults, and writes books on employee theft and related topics, such as compulsive shopping.