The Steal (29 page)

Elizabeth rode one city bus after another through the winter rain, first back to jail to get her Klonopin prescription, then to a pharmacy to refill the prescription, then to pick up her property at City Hall. The property department was closed. While riding the bus to get bonded out, she began to plan a shoplifting trip to a second mall, more suburban—“but still affluent.” She craved a black coat from White House/Black Market, but she also wanted to do a return at Nordstrom—a store whose commitment to service means that it gives customers cash for returns.

By the time she arrived, Elizabeth was mad that she got caught the first time—mad at herself and mad that Saks reclaimed the merchandise. She was mad that she had to use public transportation. She shoplifted a couple of sweaters and shirts from one store and a key chain and a pair of sunglasses from another. She shoplifted from a third and bought a gift card and exchanged it for boots. A pair of Seven jeans on the second floor of Nordstrom’s beckoned. By this time Elizabeth was anxious, and she could only extinguish the anxiety by shoplifting more. She started stuffing items into her shopping bags and raced to the third floor. She began to shuffle toward the exit, but two security guards stopped her. She started crying.

Two years later, Elizabeth was arrested for shoplifting $2,500 worth of Ed Hardy shirts at another mall. She was sent to a minimum-security prison. She spent over twelve months there, and since she had also violated her probation, she faced a possible ten-year sentence. The first letters she sent me edged between hope and fear. “It’s then that I need to become a poster child for compulsive shoplifting. . . . If Clinton can be excused from the whole Monica L. episode because he had sex addiction, I need to be able to voice how strong of a hold this compulsion has over me, how frightening, how powerful, how life destroying, how crippling, how uncontrollable I feel it is.”

“It breaks your heart,” her mother said over the phone. “She’s a regular girl. But if they let her out, she’ll shoplift again.”

Bank robberies and jewel heists command daring, skill, and technical know-how. But shoplifting is a more exhibitionist and mediagenic theft. The crime is committed during store hours, in broad daylight, in welllit stores armed with surveillance cameras, mirrors, and shiny, reflective surfaces. Shoplifters use the body—since Genesis the site of shame—to hide shoplifted objects. I read about a shoplifter who, caught with seventy-five eight-ounce glass bottles of hand lotion stuffed in his pant legs, could not be wedged into the squad car. He was arrested as he waddled away from the police. I heard a story about a pack of shoplifters who returned to their host’s apartment after a stealing expedition and started pulling one item of clothing after another from beneath their clothes, like circus clowns piling out of a VW. There is a catch-me-if-you-can quality to shoplifting.

If loss prevention can’t stop it, if the law can’t deter it, if drugs can’t cure it, can remoralization, a society-wide strengthening of the inner check, curb the epidemic? Where fear has failed, can shame succeed?

Shame is ubiquitous, or nearly so. Among primitive peoples, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski tells us, shame governs conduct. The late Japanese studies scholar Ivan Morris has written about how, from the fifth century, samurai committed hara-kiri rather than let the enemy capture them: “A warrior’s self-destruction was accepted as a release from shame.” Some psychologists have compared public officials’ committing misdemeanors like shoplifting to those public suicides. Indeed, some shoplifters kill themselves rather than endure shame. As recently as 1982, Lady Isobel Barnett, a British surgeon and former talkshow host, committed suicide after being tried for shoplifting a can of tuna.

To the liberal believer in individual dignity, making a shoplifter parade up and down wearing a sandwich board with the logo “I Am a Thief,” or posting her mug shot (on a wall, on the Internet) sounds barbaric, something a sheriff in the Deep South might do before the civil rights era. Today the South is at the front lines of so-called shame punishment—or, as some advocates often call it, “public punishment.” Yet although this punishment is scorned—by legal scholars who find no evidence that it works—and questioned by psychiatrists, it is even on the rise in shameless New York and Los Angeles, where its methods include public tip lines, Facebook, MySpace, and reality TV shows.

Judge James McKenzie, one of shame’s most vocal promoters, believes that it can make a difference. McKenzie lives in Dayton, Tennessee (population 6,180), in the eastern half of the state. One hour north of Chattanooga, Dayton was the site of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, where a landmark battle was fought over the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools.

In 2005, McKenzie started using shame to discipline young shoplifters. He believes that it is an attractive alternative to sending them to overcrowded prisons. “I hate liars and thieves,” he said as we walked from the Rhea County Courthouse, where the Scopes trial was held, and toward Dayton Coffee Shop, a country diner wedged on Second Avenue, which slopes away from the courthouse square.

Over a lunch of grits and catfish, McKenzie explained that shame was necessary to punish shoplifters because it used to work: “When I was growin’ up and I took something and I didn’t pay for it my father took me back to the store and I had to be shamed. It was enough for me. [Today ] if they’re first offenders, I give them an option—ten days in jail or four days walking in front of the store they stole from wearing a sign. They don’t like the ten days in jail. The sign says ‘I stole from Walmart. I am wearing this sign by order of Judge McKenzie.’ People take pictures of it. It’s a tourist attraction. And it’s cut down shoplifting quite a bit.”

McKenzie attributed shame’s success to Dayton’s size. “We’re not a metro area. It’s easy for people doing it to be known.”

Two hundred miles west of Dayton, in Memphis, a poor black city with a tourist strip, a ring of white suburbs and malls, and a legacy of racial tragedy, the police and the retail industry used TV to shame shoplifters. In the summer of 2008, I went there to meet Andy Wise, the executive producer and host of the show, who got the idea for it when, between 2001 and 2005, the theft rate in Memphis jumped 30 percent. The year before Wise began his crusade, the
Commercial Appeal
published an article comparing FBI shoplifting statistics in different cities: Memphis’s per capita rate of shoplifting was higher than that of Detroit and Los Angeles.

From January 2008 to May 2009, Wise hosted the first TV show in America dedicated to catching thieves.
Stop Thief!
ran at 10:15 p.m. every Friday night on WMCTV Channel 5, the NBC affiliate. “We had fifteen captures in thirteen months,” Wise said. “It made a difference.”

Just in the few days I was in Memphis,
Stop Thief!
helped the sheriff’s office catch three thieves. The show begins with a talking head (Wise) telling the story of a recent shoplifting incident. One was about a TV. The “NBC scam cam” panned to the man running through the store carrying it aloft.

The voice-over shouted, “Theft like his means YOU’RE STUCK paying an extra $3.30 on every TV sold at discount merchandise stores to cover the loss.”

Back to the footage of the shoplifter rushing across the screen.

More voice-over: “Think you know who he is? Where he is?”

I asked Wise whether an extra $3.30 really motivated people to call in to bust the shoplifter. It wasn’t the amount of money, it was “the principle of the thing,” said Wise, who attributed the high shoplifting rate in Memphis to its having “a violent inner city, liberal politics, and suburbs surrounding the city where people can go to steal.” Although he said that shoplifters “cross genders and races,” he conceded that there were fewer white ones. One was “a Caucasian perp,” a gang member. There were three white boosters. A prolific shoplifter specialized in digital readers. The NBC legal department saw no problem with legal challenges to outing shoplifters because tips are anonymous. But television has its own rules about what makes a good shoplifting story. Whereas one segment omitted the particulars about a man who played in a local church band and shoplifted a Yamaha keyboard, another aired about the manager of a fast-food joint who shoplifted a $100 bottle of whiskey. The whiskey thief made an easier target for TV-style shame.

Stop Thief!
ended, according to Wise, in part because several local stores declined to share thief-catching techniques. They thought shame worked best behind closed doors.

Using shame punishment to police shoplifting seems archaic, yet shame is the secret terror of shoplifters. Publicity is their death penalty. Although in the post–Winona Ryder, post–Terry Shulman era, some writers sign magazine pieces admitting to shoplifting, few chronic (nonwriter) shoplifters would let me use their names or incorporate significant clues to their identity. Typical was a sixty-three-year-old retired shoplifter who, when I called her back to check her story’s particulars, wailed, “If you put those details in, people will know who I am!” Also typical was the self-disgust voiced by Laura MacKenzie, an eighteen-year-old who’d stolen almost $1,000 worth of merchandize from a Filene’s in Manchester, New Hampshire. “For me just the word ‘shoplifting’ makes me cringe and feel dirty, like I need to take a shower and get it off me,” she wrote me. “I cannot express how quickly I want November to come, so I can go to court, as much as I dread it, to get the whole thing over and done with.” In the event, dread of exposure overcame the desire to be cleansed of her crime: On the day of her hearing she disappeared and was located five months later by the police in Florida.

Merely being connected to shoplifting by rumor evokes shame. In 2004, Janis Karpinski, the highest-ranking officer in Abu Ghraib, was accused of the crime just after she had revealed in public that she was not the only one who knew about the torture of prisoners. The army, Karpinski said, charged her with shoplifting because “they had nothing about Abu Ghraib to use against me. So they pull this flakey allegation out and use it to demote me.” The army has redacted Karpinski’s file so heavily that it is impossible to determine whether she shoplifted or whether the army was indeed trying to shame her to cover up a greater shame.

“Shame is the universal emotion,” the psychologist Jonathan Haidt told me. “We are one of the societies that have tried to do without it.”

Yet for the most part, shoplifting still falls outside the culture of confession, suggesting that in an era when speaking or writing openly about previously taboo subjects is an entrepreneurial frontier, stealing household trinkets from stores remains too shameful for words. Shoplifting may be the last species of creepy conduct of which that is true. The silent epidemic grows in a medium of silence.

According to the 2009
Global Retail Theft Barometer,
the only worldwide survey of the crime, the percentage of losses from retail theft, including shoplifting, rose 8.8 percent in the United States during the first year of the Great Recession. It also rose in many other countries. Although this book has focused on shoplifting in the United States, where the crime has reached epidemic levels, it is currently flourishing all over the world, and will only become more prevalent as globalism intensifies. “The main crime problem that retailers faced is shoplifting,” the 2010 survey proclaimed.

Shoplifting manifests itself differently in different regions, but one global trend is high-tech antishoplifting vigilantism accompanied by renewed efforts to make a case for the crime as a symbol of enduring social inequality. In 2010, a British company called Internet Eyes launched a CCTV “online instant event notification system.” After paying a modest subscription fee, couch potatoes anywhere in the European Union can earn up to £1,000 a month by catching British shoplifters they see on live CCTV feeds streamed in from stores to their televisions. The company plans a worldwide launch in 2011.

In the city of York, about a year earlier, an Anglican vicar made international headlines by counseling starving congregants to shoplift. Father Tim Jones advised, “I would ask that they do not steal from small, family businesses, but from national businesses.”

The British Retail Trade Consortium, the Yorkshire police, the archdeacon of York, and Lord Carey, a former archbishop of Canterbury, condemned the vicar’s advice. A representative from the British supermarket chain ASDA, which is owned by Walmart, said that shoplifting did not steal from the rich, but from its hardworking staff. Another quipped that Jones was “one psalm short of a sermon.”

Jones replied, “Walmart is a trade union recognition short of an ethical employment policy.” He reached back into church history to defend himself: “What I said is nothing more than St. Ambrose, St. John Chrysostom and St. Thomas Aquinas said. What is more, everything I said . . . is backed up by all the relevant papal encyclicals of the 20th century.”

Writing in the
Times Online
, Julian Baggini, author of several books on ethics, disagreed. If people shoplift when they cannot afford food, “it just mimics the theft at the top,” and ultimately creates a vicious cycle, he wrote. If we all act desperately in desperate times, society will crumble.

 

 

Over the past few years in Japan, as social structures protecting families fell apart, senior citizens began to commit the biggest proportion of shoplifting; jails added low-sodium diets to their meal plans and safety bars to their cells. In Russia, where only after the fall of communism did enough products appear on store shelves for people to shoplift, one entrepreneur offers a shoplifting game: Businessmen pay a fee to run through supermarkets for a half hour, vying to steal the most expensive item without getting caught. Of course, not every incidence of shoplifting ends with the loser taking the winner out to a lavish dinner; the crime more often results in tragedy. In 2009, on the sidewalk outside a Walmart supercenter in the city of Jingdezhen, China, five employees beat a woman to death after she allegedly shoplifted.