The Steal (27 page)

Over lunch in a hamburger joint near IntelliVid’s Cambridge office, I asked Sobalvarro why he thought stores did not want to talk about shoplifting, and he said, “shame.” LP people are ashamed of shoplifting, he continued, because they recognize that their initial response—outrage—is too ferocious an emotion to feel for the loss of an object. “Shoplifting is a hush-hush issue because it is a violation, an evidence of something out of control, a weakness.”

Though I tried many times, the closest I came to seeing LP staff catch a shoplifter was in Gaithersburg, Maryland, when a young agent agreed to bring me “backstage” at the local Target one afternoon as long as I did not use his name. From the parking lot, the store looked like a giant mausoleum. Although it was not peak shopping time, Target was packed. Shoppers clustered near the front door, studying the bargains in that week’s circular like touts studying racing forms at the track. It was right after Christmas, and sales were in progress.

My host escorted me around the store and showed me how he walked around to see if anything was being shoplifted. Sometimes he checked inventory as many as three times on his shift.

We went into his office. It was gray: walls, carpeting, metal desk, computer. Along one wall ran the kind of metal bar that you find in handicapped bathrooms. LP agents handcuff shoplifters if they cause trouble, he explained. A doorway led to the command center, a tiny windowless room, about 10 x 10, with rows of monitors bolted into three walls. Target uses a medium-old system with cameras that came out about seven to eight years ago.

The two LP agents had piled surveillance videotapes high on every available surface. One LP agent, Don, an African American man in his twenties, wore elegant braids; Joseph was a pimply white youth in his late teens. Without shifting his gaze from the monitors, Don joked that the tapes of shoplifters were better than anything on
America’s Funniest Home Videos
.

Swirling around the room was the masculine feeling one notices when one has the misfortune to be in the same room with men watching a sporting event. Someone muttered, “I’m gonna get them.” Someone else grunted and cried, “Aw,” as if a favorite player had fumbled a ball. The LP guys expressed opinions about stops and compared rules in various states. “What do you think about surveillance in dressing rooms?” Don asked me. I said I expected privacy, and he rolled his eyes.

The LP agents kept up a hopeful, sly patter, both connected to what was going on in the store and floating above it. “Look at the bag. We need a camera down that aisle,” Don, the more experienced one, said. He shifted to camera 4, where a man he thought he had seen shoplifting in the past was—we hoped—about to do it again. When he zoomed in, though, we were disappointed. “It’s not him. We know him,” he said, grabbing the joystick as though he were playing a video game and switching to another screen, where a young black girl was examining a curling iron.

The girl turned over the box and read the information on the back. Finally, she put it in her cart and wheeled into another lane, out of the camera’s reach. “Stop being so indecisive,” Don said, cajoling and reprimanding her. Joseph shook his head. “She’s in a bad spot.”

But Don replied, with disappointment in his voice, “I think she’s going to be a law-abiding citizen.” He began to chant, “Stop watching. Can’t stop watching.” On another monitor, a guy in a blue hat riding the up escalator seemed familiar to the LP guys. But Curling Iron Girl had made it to the cashier, and we had to pursue her if we wanted to stop her. Don zoomed in on her credit card, printed out its info, and compared it to a list of fraudulent credit cards. It passed. Hours had gone by. All I had to show for it was a cramp in my leg.

When I stumbled from backstage into the store, it was bright, like a power plant on the highway at night. The sun shone like a metal disc, and the gray sky pressed down on piles of slushy, dirty snow pushed to the parking lot’s edges. I have yet to see anyone catch a shoplifter.

As loss prevention efforts, though providing a diversity of methods, cannot erase the crime, so approaches in the self-help industry hold a false nostrum for curing the disease. The handful of not-for-profit groups across the country aiming to help shoplifters stop differ a good deal in their approach and success rates, such as they are revealed. Some imitate twelve-step programs, and others juggle behavioral approaches with varying doses of compassion. I met no one who forbade shoplifters from stealing. “This is not a morality play,” the head of one antitheft group based in Denver explained to me.

A group claiming a method specifically designed to stop shoplifting is Portland’s Theft Talk. Shoplifters come to Theft Talk in three ways: Before sentencing, after sentencing, or of their own volition. The first two options are part of the alternative sentencing movement that began in the late 1960s to keep petty offenders and the mentally ill out of jail. The third reflects the self-help approach.

By “going at it from the viewpoint of the thief,” as Lisa Paules, the daughter of the organization’s founder and director Steve Houseworth, puts it, Theft Talk is unique. Whereas other programs specializing in treating thieves weed out recidivists, Theft Talk allows all shoplifters, including boosters and “theft addicts,” to attend meetings.

Theft Talk began in 1983, when Steve Houseworth and Patrick Murphy were trying to forge an alternative to the existing social service organizations’ smorgasbord approach to addressing theft. Houseworth had graduated from Portland State University with a BA in psychology, and Lewis & Clark College with an MA in counseling. He and Murphy, juvenile probation officers just outside Portland, borrowed lingo (“cops and robbers thinking,” “licensing,” “mental rehearsing”) from psychiatrists Aaron T. Beck and Lawrence Kohlberg, and from psychologist Stanton Samenow. Stereotyped as either a “dewy-eyed liberal” or “a hardline reactionary,” Samenow, in his 1984 book
Inside the Criminal Mind,
challenged theories blaming society, one’s parents, and mental illness for criminals’ actions. Echoing other anti-Freudians of his era, Samenow believes that “a person may steal so often that others become convinced that he is compulsive and a ‘kleptomaniac’ [his quotes] but a thorough examination would show that he is simply a habitual thief.”

Murphy left Theft Talk after the first or second year to become a schoolteacher. But Houseworth remained. A few years ago, he created a research arm for the organization, the National Center for the Study of Theft Behaviors, to sift through the piles of data he had accumulated over the past twenty-five years. “I am actively working on a database of 35,000 clients to be completed by the end of the year,” he wrote in a catch-up letter in 2008. Like Samenow, Houseworth dismisses kleptomania. “If you have kleptomania, why are you taking jewelry? . . . Why didn’t you steal kitty litter and garbage bags?”

Houseworth concluded that the criminal justice system has failed to stop “theft offenders”—the penal system’s term for thieves—from stealing. “People are taught to be obedient—‘don’t steal.’ Or they are given family counseling, which also doesn’t work. They are told, ‘You better not be stealing or you will go to jail.’ Criminals don’t like to follow rules, so here instead of making them follow rules we like to understand—let’s talk about why.”

Houseworth uses cognitive behavioral theory to sidestep the question of what to call shoplifting. “Let’s not deal with whether you are an addict or not or a kleptomaniac or not. Let’s just deal with the fact that you are regularly attracted to stealing.” But Theft Talk can also sound a little like Nancy Reagan in her “Just Say No” phase. The organization explained thieves’ motives on its website:

Theft Talk seminars last four hours. “ ‘You must have eighteen months to restructure behavior’—that is not our approach,” Houseworth says, adding that most courts in Oregon believe that half a workday is the amount of time it should take to teach someone that shoplifting is wrong.

 

 

The monthly shoplifting session conducted by the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention or NASP (founded by Peter Berlin) at its office in Jericho, Long Island—about an hour west of Manhattan—could not be more different. NASP takes the stand that people shouldn’t shoplift—it is after all, a crime. The organization, which says that it has been “nationally recognized for encouraging the lowest recidivism rates among shoplifters,” compares on its website a rate of between “1.5 percent and 3.0 percent for the more comprehensive programs” and “up to 25 percent in communities without effective programs.”

NASP argues that stores would be closer to ending shoplifting if they acknowledged that the biggest problem is that ordinary Americans—not boosters—commit the crime. The organization draws shoplifters from all five boroughs of New York City, as well as Westchester County and other parts of New York State. At one fall session a few years ago, six regulars—one man and five women—sat around the conference table. Caroline Kochman, Peter Berlin’s daughter, attended, as did Gina Hoelderlin, who ran the sessions until 2008. Hoelderlin placed a large stack of dog-eared folders in front of her. A plate of store-bought cookies rested in the center of the table.

Peter Berlin, who is now retired, made a special appearance to introduce the shoplifters. “We have a teacher, a doctor, a homemaker,” he began. He said a few words on shoplifting and shame. “Shoplifting is shameful because there is the feeling that something is wrong with you for a nonacceptable reason. This is different than drinking or taking drugs. Those things are understandable. You can see the effects. But not if you’re a shoplifter.”

Candace was silent. She had sworn off stores. She didn’t even put gas in the car for fear that she would become too confident and shoplift. She sent her daughter. Jane, a shoplifting grandmother, regularly left the grocery store carrying a stolen object under her arm, such as a plastic container of cut-up fruit. “Supermarkets are hard for me,” she said. Sometimes at night she would spill milk on the counter so she would have an excuse to return to the store, where she could shoplift. Arrested three times, she swore off her habit and slipped back in an endgame of anguish and celebration. “My stealing inspires disgrace and disgust. I am like a yo-yo,” she said, arguing that she deserved whatever punishment she got. She did not want her children to know that she was “a bad person.” Her husband, whom she described as “an honest man,” prayed for her.

Peter Berlin suggested that Jane forswear shoplifting on Mondays and Thursdays, but she worried about bingeing the rest of the week. Jane lamented being so brazen and wondered if she was crazy. Then she grinned. “Tomorrow will be a week since I’ve stolen anything.”

Gina Hoelderlin recalled the time Jane quit for a couple of years. “It gave me chills,” she said. But Jane only remembered her agony and her pitiable life. “How will I satisfy myself? Cooking for him?” Jane asked. “My accomplishment is to shoplift.” She slumped into silence.

Darren, an older man with white hair, glasses, a round face, and a big belly, shoplifted from the supermarket and switched price tags on meat. He had whittled down his habit to two or three times a week—much less than in the old days. He preferred coming to the group to seeing a doctor, who “treated him with kid gloves.” Darren saw shoplifting like baseball. He had to “get to bat, get to the plate.” He declared himself a bad person too.

“It’s morally wrong,” Alana told Peter Berlin. Although she had first started coming to NASP in 1992, Alana had been stealing since childhood. According to her story, rummaging through her mother’s pocketbook, she found something her mother had shoplifted. After that discovery, she stole a potato or a loaf of bread now and again. As an adult, she was unable to separate the addiction to shoplifting from a plain old desire to have things. But she felt it. “I must say that during those initial years, the habit was strong.”

After a few arrests, the judge put Alana on probation. She didn’t stop, and the judge sent her to jail for three weeks. Now every time she and her husband drive by the jail, they nod at each other. (She hid her habit from him for twenty years.) Shortly after her release, Alana shoplifted again. That time, the judge mandated an ankle bracelet. Alana begged to be punished and then complained of the “pressure of being good for too long.”

From month to month the population of the group changed. There were regulars and newbies. Generally meetings were peaceful, but arguments did break out.

“My mother taught me how to steal. Put that in your book,” Erica, an ex-gambler, shouted across the table one Tuesday night. She and a more timid shoplifter had just finished arguing over whether stealing was an illness or a crime. Coming from the world of twelve-step programs, Erica preferred the “I am sick” explanation.

“I’m still a bad person,” the other woman insisted.

“I don’t look at myself as a bad person. I look at myself as a sick person,” Erica countered. Her sidekick, a well-dressed newbie in her thirties, asked the group, “Am I a klepto?”

The newbie had shoplifted $50,000 worth of clothing with a partner over three years. Now, about to go to her hearing, she was upset. “I can’t figure me out,” she said, pulling a pair of needle-nose pliers and a pair of scissors out of a brown LeSportsac change purse and throwing them onto the middle of the table. She carried the tools of her trade and a pillowcase whenever she went out to shoplift. If the store detective stopped her, she said she was trying to match the pillowcase to whatever she was fingering. Later, she expressed contempt for another attendee who shoplifted from the clearance table. “If I’m gonna steal shit, it should be big,” she said.