The Steal

by Rachel Shteir

  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.

  CONCLUSION

  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.

  The opening of supermarkets, hypermarkets, and luxury shopping malls and districts worldwide has made shoplifting more visible and forced modern psychological, legal, and retail remedies to collide with corporeal solutions from ancient cultures. In Singapore, where the crime can result in a seven-year prison sentence, some shoplifters still seek spirit doctors to exorcize the stealing demon. In Dubai and Abu Dhabi, where, according to common wisdom, shoplifting has historically been low, luxury malls have begun to hire Western-style loss prevention teams and secret shoppers as well as to install state-of-the-art camera systems and tags. If the dollar amount of the shoplifted items is high enough, residents are jailed, while nonresidents have their photos posted in stores and are deported. In a throwback to the eighteenth century, when female shoplifters used skirts as props, on Zamzama Boulevard, Karachi’s main shopping district, teams of burka-wearing boosters hit jewelry stores. Back in 2005, these thieves, who sewed deep pockets in their garments, were so prevalent that jewelers in one Indian city tried to ban burkas. Officials, fearing ethnic strife, declined to do so.

  According to Amnesty International, chopping off a thief’s hand endures in parts of the Arab world, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia. When the Somalian al-Shabab militia amputated the right hand and the left foot of four alleged thieves in 2009, hundreds of people attended the event. But severing is not always dispensed for shoplifting. Sometimes Sharia courts rule that being turned away from heaven will suffice as a punishment.

  How to punish shoplifting will always be in question. There are those who believe that, in our unstable economy, given the large thefts of white-collar thugs and high-profile con artists, and the increasing gap between the superrich and everyone else, shoplifting need only be considered in the category of moral turpitude and disciplined with community service. Others think that harsh punishment is our only chance of deterring shoplifters. However it is sentenced, shoplifting can flash up anywhere, not just in the headlines but in front of us when we least expect it.

  Walking down the street in New York on a hot summer afternoon last year, I passed one of the fruit carts that stand on nearly every corner. The vendor, a slight, bald man in his forties, rested under an umbrella. The cart was piled high with avocados, pineapples, mangoes, bananas, and plastic shell boxes of blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. The man sold different brands than the grocery store or bodega, but everything cost half the price. There were no antishoplifting devices.

  School had just let out for the year. A gang of kids, eight or nine of them, maybe in junior high, jogged up behind me in a loose pack, the smallest one at the back. They passed me, and as they passed the fruit vendor, several of them grabbed fistfuls of bananas and cherries, as if they were sampling fruit in a store. They kept jogging, screaming and laughing, eating the fruit. One of the leaders, a big girl in a white T-shirt, clutched a sprig of cherries above her head in victory. The fruit vendor began screaming. He took a few menacing steps after the kids. He would call the police. He raised his fist. He would file a police report. The gang didn’t seem to hear him. Or maybe they knew his threats were empty. And when the vendor closed the distance—it didn’t take more than a few large steps—instead of continuing down the block, they stopped, turned around, and began throwing chunks of the half-eaten bananas and the cherries at him. A woman walking by got caught in the fruit volley, smacked in the cheek with some cherry flesh. She only muttered a curse of disapproval and, wiping it off, kept walking.

  Suddenly tiring of their game, the kids stopped throwing the fruit. They started jogging down the street again. I passed them a half block down. They were gathered around a fire hydrant, eating what fruit they had not thrown at the vendor, spitting out the pits, tossing the brownyellow peels on the sidewalk, and laughing.

  There is no single reason for shoplifting’s rise. In our world, where greed and consumerism are encouraged, where social and economic inequality are swelling, and where rogues like Robin Hood are admired, the crime will continue to grow. But a serious study of shoplifting should not be content to bemoan the crime’s ubiquity; it should observe that every time you walk into a store, the cost of the crime is reflected in the artillery of antishoplifting devices around you as well as the elevated prices of the items you’re buying. Consumers are now suspects. And, indeed, a looming issue for the retail industry is transparency. Maybe in the future stores will make public the details of how they deal with shoplifters just as governments are publishing their secrets. But thus far, no Julian Assange has appeared to reveal the secrets of Bergdorf’s, Loehmann’s, and everything in between. That is not even taking into account the cost of shoplifting in human and social terms. To accept the crime as an immutable part of the global landscape means to accept that we can’t always predict who is shoplifting. It is to accept that trying to get something for nothing is considered by many people the best way to survive—even flourish. Yet if we know we can never eradicate the crime, we can try to take a hard look at the costs. An investigation of where shoplifting came from and why people do it exposes important truths about our mar
kets, our courtrooms, and our identities. It reminds us of the secrets that shoplifters and stores want to hide.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my admirable agent, Lynn Nesbit, for taking a chance on this project and for her enduring support. Ann Godoff offered encouragement, tough-minded notes, and terrific lunches; I am especially grateful to Jack Beatty for his wisdom and patience, his thoughtful, rigorous editing, and his sense of humor. At Penguin, Lindsay Whalen was always on point. Jeanette Gingold brilliantly copyedited. Karen Abbott, Dick Babcock, Sebastian Currier, Gioia Diliberto, David Hirshey, Mary Beth Hughes, Dennis Hutchinson, Brendan McNally, Carlos Murillo, Jonathan Santlofer, Philip Weiss, Rishona Zimring, and Thad Ziolkowski were among those who kindly read drafts, sections of drafts, and provided hand-holding, ears, and other types of advice and sustenance that one needs while writing a book. In New York, Tarik O’Regan and Suki Kim, David Nasaw and Dinitia Smith, and Rob Bourne helped me with housing over the years, and Una Chaudhuri made available access to the Bobst Library, contact information of Sharia scholars, and anecdotes about the UAE. James Piecowye, the host of Nightline DubaiEye, sent me a podcast of a show that ran about shoplifting there. Simona Levi answered questions in Barcelona. Elise Slobodin and Catherine Scheinman made contacts in their fields available, and Michael Kinghorn translated the story of one Brazilian shoplifter in Minneapolis. Thanks to Terence Dixon. Thanks to David Margolick for advising with legal and journalistic issues and agreeing to help on a number of occasions. Celia Lowenstein opened her Rolodex. Lee Froehlich offered various contacts and eyewitness accounts. Stephen Hacker and Michelle Turner supplied local history and gourmet dinners in Louisville. All of my assistants deserve Purple Hearts for helping me tackle obscure research problems and for facing down the mountain of papers involved in writing this book. But Liza Lichtenfeld stands out. Also thanks to Bonnie Litowitz for helping the project along from the beginning.