The Steal (12 page)

Several diners repeated the phrase “Shoplifting builds community” as they plowed through cheese, fish, chocolate, and expensive bottles of wine, alluding to something young Americans are hungry for—a nip of luxury, a taste of possessing something out of your reach, and the possibility of creating your own rough justice.

Yomango became a darling of the American art scene in 2004, when MASS MoCA, the contemporary art museum in North Adams, Massachusetts, included them in a group show about activist artists. A booster bag was exhibited near their art. The following year, New York University invited Yomango to “The War of the Worlds,” an international two-day symposium on art and activism. According to one person who was there, the group did an “action” at the Diesel store in SoHo. (Or as Bani Brufadino, one of the founders of Yomango, told me, they “changed the space.”)

One evening Brufadino delivered an informal talk at the Change You Want to See Gallery in Williamsburg. About fifty people gathered there to imbibe Yomango’s wisdom about shoplifting: hipsters, politically committed New Yorkers, fellow travelers, and gawkers perched on folding chairs. Many in the audience wore leather jackets or granny glasses or both. In front of a large screen displaying small avatars and brands stood Brufadino and a female accomplice.

An Italian who lived in Barcelona, Brufadino was in his twenties. Dressed in a red hoodie with an unrecognizable black logo and jeans, he began to describe shoplifting (he preferred the word “taking”) as a mash-up of Hoffman and Rousseau: Shoplifting was both a righting of personal wrongs and a theoretical exit ramp out of the system. “Corporations steal fashions like baggy trousers, which kids wore while their older brothers were in jail, and then they sell them back to us,” he said in a thick accent, but added that he had shoplifted his jeans because “he needed trousers.”

The audience peppered Brufadino with questions. One person kept interrupting, “I want to make sure I get it.”

Another asked, “Is this Marxist?”

A young woman joked, “What would Jesus say?”

Laughter. Someone else yelled, “He’s not for private property!”

“Let’s e-mail Jesus,” a third person screamed.

Asked what sort of people joined Yomango, Brufadino responded “Yomango is you.”

She could not help feeling the claim of each trinket and valuable upon her personally and yet she did not stop. There was nothing there which she could not have used and nothing which she did not long to own.

—Theodore Dreiser,
Sister Carrie

For much of its six-century history, shoplifting—whether defined as disease or crime—was considered something women did. But since the 1980s, men have caught up. While men shoplift more, there are more female kleptomaniacs. Yet when it comes to what men and women steal, some studies sound drawn from a pre–Betty Friedan world. In 2005, the Centre for Retail Research in the United Kingdom measured what men and women shoplift: Women steal cosmetics, clothes, jewelry, and perfume; men steal electronics, televisions, and handheld and power tools. Women shoplift from department and discount stores; men from home centers and hardware stores. Although 80 percent of all readers are women, the Centre discovered, most book shoplifters are men.

In the summer of 2009, I lunched at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, near Buckingham Palace, with Joshua Bamfield, a professor of management turned retail researcher who heads the Centre in Nottingham. Where the sheriff of Nottingham used to work, he joked.

As we wandered toward the club’s bar, in a dark, cavernous room in the Greek Revival building, I asked him to explain the gender breakdown in his research. Bamfield, a cheerful, balding man in his sixties, leaned into the bar, ordered a pre-lunch port, and said, “A few years ago I went to the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, and I saw their new security system. So what kinds of books are being stolen here, I asked? Porn and business, right?”

“‘No, it’s theology,’ they said.”

Bamfield began to laugh. “It just goes to show you.”

We moved upstairs to the dining room. Although the club has accepted female members since the 1970s, there were no women, except for a few coat-check girls hovering in the reception area.

As Bamfield and I settled in, we returned to the topic of gender. Were men stealing books for their girlfriends? What about the other gender-obvious exception in Bamfield’s study? Men shoplift hair dryers. Does this suggest that men are more sensitive about their looks? Or that they are becoming more so? Or does it mean that women are shopping less and men sharing the household chores (like shopping and therefore shoplifting) more?

Bamfield laughed again and answered, “There are many different things. Some men are stealing for resale. It is easier for men to get away with stealing electronics than women’s clothing. We think that men look at [the hair dryer] as an electrical device rather than beauty device. It’s easy for men to sell to other males.”

Bamfield was also referring to the commonly held belief among criminologists that men resell the items they shoplift, whereas women dabble, shoplifting domestic items to enhance their homes, food to sustain their children, and clothing and accessories to improve their appearance. Bamfield ordered meat and potatoes and a carafe of rosé, and I decided on a Cajun salad.

Bamfield, who introduced civil restitution to the United Kingdom in 1998, said it was important to study further how men and women shoplift differently: “The picture is complex,” he said, adding that professionals of both sexes used gender-specific tools to steal. Men liked knapsacks. Women preferred strollers.

 

 

At the same time as criminologists began to express skepticism that shoplifting was exclusively—or even primarily—a woman’s crime, feminist historians endeavored to overturn the idea that kleptomania is uniquely a women’s disease. In her award-winning 1989 social history,
When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store,
Elaine S. Abelson contends not just that the Victorians invented kleptomania, but that American popular culture’s treatment of the disease as proof of women’s omnivorous appetites echoes the misogyny with which Victorian doctors, stores, and the popular press described it.

A very different attempt to attribute kleptomania’s all-girl reputation to misogyny in this era came from Louise J. Kaplan’s 1990 book,
Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary
, which was made into a feature film starring Tilda Swinton as Eve, an icy, manipulative lawyer who has forged ahead by playing a man’s game, while her sister, a dysfunctional graduate student, gets arrested for shoplifting. Kaplan, a psychoanalyst, wrote the book to challenge Freudian sexism. She believes that kleptomania, a female disease, “is a response to the social order where those with penises control the source and flow of economic goods.” She is one of a few writers to perceive shoplifting and kleptomania as reflections of the same excessive consumption problem.

Kaplan almost convinces the reader that gender equality will stop women from shoplifting. But Jon Grant, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota who studies compulsive gambling and shoplifting, believes that we continue to gender kleptomania because of stereotypes. “Men tend to be criminalized and sent straight to jail whereas women get sent to doctors and get a chance to be rehabilitated.”

I encountered plenty of men of all ages, races, and occupations who shoplifted. But I met far more female chronic shoplifters who shoplifted regularly over long periods of time. Of these, the majority were unemployed or underemployed women (although some were gainfully employed but underpaid, like schoolteachers). Besides that, the shoplifters did not share a particular profile: They were married with children, childless, or single; college coeds and retirees. Hardly any women shoplifting were comfortable describing themselves as kleptomaniacs, even if they had stolen from stores twice a day for ten years. Some flinched when I used the word. Others talked about shoplifting in the same hushed voices that I imagined kleptomaniacs used in Freud’s era when confessing to it led to ostracism or the asylum. It disturbed and thrilled them.

Framing shoplifting as a reflection of female consumption caught on (again) in the 1990s, when psychoanalysts and research psychiatrists began to explore whether “female appetite diseases” such as body dysmorphia, anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive buying were connected to kleptomania. In a talk she gave at the Freud Museum in London, the feminist writer and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach attributed her female patients’ shoplifting to consumerism. The frustration of wanting something more sustaining than a mere article of clothing and yet not being able to get it, she wrote, the disappointment left over from childhood, and the disappointment that going to the store turns out to be more of a sentence than an adventure explain why women steal.

The Belgian psychiatrist Walter Vandereycken found that kleptomania was more common in people who have bulimia—most of whom are women—than in those without it. “There’s an immense gender difference between how men and women deal with psychological disorders,” he told me. “Women internalize problems and men externalize them. Is it cultural? Is it biological? We don’t know.”

But Gail Caputo, a professor of criminology at Rutgers University, believes that more women shoplift because women are more susceptible to poverty and depression. Her 2008 book,
Out in the Storm: Drug-Addicted Women Living as Shoplifters and Sex Workers,
refrains from judging its subjects, most of whom are working-class or poor, drug-addicted women. She defines shoplifting as an illegal form of work. “[Shoplifting] is less invasive [than prostitution] and [women shoplifters] can see themselves as the caretakers of the situation,” she told me, explaining that women would do anything—even steal—to protect their children.

I found the most convincing explanation for why there may be more chronic shoplifting among women in an essay by the late writer Caroline Knapp: Unable to navigate the supposed freedoms that the sexual revolution delivered, women still struggle more with consumption and identity than men. “Where are the lines between satisfaction and excess, between restraint and indulgence, between pleasure and self-destruction? And why are they so difficult to find, particularly for women?”

Age is as murky a factor as gender in predicting who will shoplift. According to Ellen Chandler, a counselor who has worked with senior criminals for over ten years at the Broward Senior Intervention and Education Program in Hollywood, Florida—one of the only programs in the country devoted to helping the elderly navigate the criminal justice system—shoplifting is the most common crime: 75 percent of her clients do it. She added that very few of them steal food. “Some of ’em have a sense of entitlement and . . . they kinda get real, real snippy. . . . But the majority of them admit it, but they don’t understand why. Sometimes people really think it was purely accidental. The first case I ever had, the woman was eighty-four years old . . . went into Walgreens. She bought some items. And then for the other stuff, she walked out and got caught.”

Although retail stores used to tolerate shoplifting among the elderly, some big-box stores have installed zero-tolerance policies for the crime, which has led to the arrest of more seniors for stealing everything from dentures and hearing-aid batteries to fruit. Whatever kinds of things elderly people shoplift, their crime incites more than its share of rage and suspicion.

In 2009, Ella Orko, eighty-six years old, was arrested for shoplifting at a Chicago supermarket. It was her sixty-first arrest since 1956. The police referred to her as both a “career” shoplifter and a “habitual” shoplifter. Among the items Orko shoplifted were wrinkle cream, canned salmon, instant coffee, and batteries. Over the course of her life, she had assumed at least fifty aliases, police said.

At sentencing, Orko rolled into court in a wheelchair wearing a neck brace and pleading deafness, although when arrested two days earlier, she was wheelchair- and neck-brace-free. The judge, who wore hearing aids on both ears, sentenced her to time served in light of her advanced age.

While Americans are far more comfortable regarding shoplifting as a young person’s moral problem than as an old person’s social or economic one, some scholars believe young people may be overrepresented in the most dramatic studies, which show that 40 percent of young people have shoplifted. The criminologist Richard Hollinger attributed high percentages of young people shoplifting to this group’s availability to social scientists. “Where would we be without the sophomore survey?” he joked.

Just because children shoplift does not mean they will grow up to be—as Hollinger put it, referring to the felled Enron executive—“the next Kenneth Lay.” Developmental psychologists believe that up to age nine, children shoplift to test boundaries. Tweens should have a more fully formed sense of these boundaries, and if teenagers shoplift, they may be acting out or depressed, peer-pressured into performing a rite of passage, or seeking a thrill.

The prejudices many feel toward immigrants, especially since 9/11, may inflate statistics averring that the group shoplifts more than whites. On May 1, 2006, the so-called Day Without Immigrants, when Latinos across the country boycotted stores to agitate for amnesty and legalization, an Internet rumor circulated that shoplifting decreased 67.8 percent. Watchdog websites discredited the rumor, but that it was floated in the first place testifies to prejudice’s power.