March 26, 2006

• Shoplifting, Kleptomania, and Impulse Control

  Some weeks ago, the Anchorage NPR station KSKA ran a few trailers for an episode of The Infinite Mind
  about shoplifting.  Being a semi-retired* shoplifter myself, I
  said to myself, “That should be interesting,” thinking that the show
  might provide some insight into my own behavior.   I did learn
  some things from the broadcast, but it was not until afterward as I
  reflected on what I had learned that I gained any significant insight
  into my own mind.

  Here’s a little of what I learned:  Before the American Civil War, there had been no shoplifting. 
  Theft was a different procedure back then.  Shopping was a much
  different and more personal process.  Shopkeepers kept merchandise
  on relatively inaccessible floor-to-ceiling shelves and in bins and
  cabinets to which only they had access.  Customers asked for what
  they wanted and the storekeepers filled their orders.

  Clothing, if not home-made, was made to order and fit by seamstresses
  and tailors.  In the Civil War, “the need to supply large armies
  with uniforms gave rise to the ‘science of averaging,’ or the notion
  that all men could be fitted into one of three size categories: large,
  small and an average of those two called medium.  Other items
  besides clothing were taking America from home-made to ready-made
  goods.  Such trying times as presented by the war made many
  Americans in a hurry to acquire things, trappings of wealth and
  respectability.  The immediate aftermath of the Civil War
  stimulated the growth and appetite of the middle class. There was money
  around begging to be spent.  Ready-to-wear items were seen as a
  natural extension of the new pretenders to the leisure class, the
  middle class. Retailers were coming up with ways to help them spend
  it.  There was a change in the psychology of selling. 
  Retailers saw that they could create rather than just respond to a
  customer’s need.  Initially, this psychology was seen in the rise
  of the department store.” (ilstu.edu)

  After the Civil War, A. T. Stewart, R.H. Macy and other entrepreneurs
  changed the face of retail sales and developed the science of
  marketing to create demand.  They installed rest rooms and restaurants in their
  stores to turn them into places where women would want to stay and
  browse.  Shoppers were encouraged to touch the merchandise, sample
  perfumes and cosmetics, and try on the ready-to-wear clothing. 
  “On the day before Christmas, 1870, Elizabeth Phelps, a wealthy New
  York philanthropist and feminist, went shopping at New York City’s
  Macy’s. She was a vice president and member of the executive committee
  of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s National Woman’s Suffrage Association. Her
  husband was worth a lot of money; in fact he could have probably bought
  Macy’s. But, apparently, she was also a thief because one of the
  “waiter-girls”, Margaret Grotty, saw her lift a small package of
  candy.” (ilstu.edu)

  On that same day, Mary Bryant, Sophie Eisner and Elizabeth Claussen
  were
  also arrested for stealing from Macy’s.  As people began
  discussing the cases, it turned into an issue of class
  differences.  Some questioned the propriety of Rowland Macy’s
  measures to protect his openly-displayed and readily filched
  merchandise from theft.  Elizabeth Phelps’s trial
  was a cause célèbre.  In her version of events, it was
  all a misunderstanding.  The shop girl and her employer saw it
  differently.  Opinions about the case, and about shoplifting in
  general, became polarized.   One school of opinion was that
  it was not really “stealing” but merely “mischief” if one took what one
  could easily buy.

  A children’s clapping rhyme became popular:

  I won’t go to Macy’s any more, more, more,
  There’s a big fat policeman at the door, door, door,
  He’ll grab you by the collar,
  And make you pay a dollar,
  So don’t go to Macy’s any more, more, more.

  Nine years ago a retired Anglican minister, the Rev. John Papworth,
  was censured for telling a group of police officers that shoplifting
  from large stores was justified, while he did not condone stealing from
  small, family stores. “I don’t regard it as stealing; I regard it as a
  badly needed reallocation of resources,” he said. “When people do it,
  for me, it has no moral significance. For me, it is not a sin.” 
  His superiors in the Church of England did not agree with him, but
  there is a large segment of Western society that feels as he
  does.  His is the view of shoplifting I was taught in the
  1960s.  Long ago, I resolved for myself the moral and ethical
  issues involved.

  The parts of the broadcast on The Infinte Mind that interested me the
  most were on the psycho-social and neurological aspects of
  shoplifting.  The program drew a distinction between shoplifting,
  which they viewed in psycho-social terms, and kleptomania, which was
  presented as a neurological phenomenon.

  In the Victorian Era, kleptomania was seen as a “women’s disorder,” and
  prevailing medical opinion at the time associated it with pelvic
  disorders.  A lady who was caught stealing would claim to know
  nothing about how an item ended up in her folded umbrella or the pocket
  of her skirt, and she would be sent to her doctor to seek treatment for
  her mania.  While the paternalistic and “protective” treatment
  such middle- and upper-class women received in court would keep them
  out of jail, it is debatable whether they fared any better in the
  treatment they received from their physicians than did their
  lower-class sisters in the slammer.  Being neutered through
  hysterectomy or being turned into a drug addict may or may not be
  preferable to being in jail.

  Neuroscience has progressed, as has society’s view of women’s
  responsibility.  Kleptomania is now seen as an impulse-control
  disorder, a seizure-like disorder of the limbic system similar to
  compulsive gambling and other addictions.  It is known to be
  associated with lesions or abnormal electrical activity in the brain’s
  inferior frontal lobe.  Those with the disorder are often found
  upon autopsy to have anomalous fiber density in that area of the
  brain.  Kleptomania is being successfully treated with naltrexone
  (an opioid antagonist used in treating alcoholism) and SSRIs (selective
  serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft,
  etc.).  I strongly suspect that it would also respond to
  orthomolecular treatment with nutritional supplements, and with fewer
  toxic side-effects.

  Not all shoplifting is symptomatic of kleptomania.  Many social
  psychologists, as well as the cop-types in charge of store security and
  “shrinkage control” who devise the shoplifiting profiles intended to
  simplify the apprehension of shoplifters, understand that most
  shoplifters are teens.  The psycho-social motivation there
  involves the adolescent need to separate from parents, which often
  manifests in their “rebelling” and liking anything the parents dislike,
  doing things the parents disapprove, etc.  A large number of
  youthful shoplifters are doing it to impress their peers and/or for the
  thrill of getting away with breaking a taboo.  That show on The
  Infinite Mind included first-person stories from several teens who
  expressed those motivations.

  After listening to the program, it struck me that although I had
  started shoplifting in my teens, I had never been one of those kids
  doing it to be part of the gang or for thrills.  I certainly had
  gotten into the spirit of the thing with the same competitive verve and
  obsessive-compulsive tendency to do things to extremes with which at
  that age I approached everything.  But my motivation was the
  merchandise itself or the money I could get for it from the
  fence.  The items I stole, then in the beginning, were either
  practical things such as food and clothing, or small items with big
  price tags that a fence would buy.

  When I got out of jail after my first arrest, I was afraid to steal anything.  I even went hungry,
  sometimes for long periods of time, often because I couldn’t buy food
  and wouldn’t steal.  Gradually, my fear of jail receded and my old
  socio-political programming reasserted itself.  I think I also
  must have been working through and transcending my guilt and
  self-loathing, or else I had gone into denial about it.  I was
  developing some survival instinct.  I would steal what I needed if
  I couldn’t afford to buy it.

  After I got involved with outlaw bikers, I would also steal things to
  share with the group or to trade for a place to sleep, a ride
  somewhere, etc.  During that phase, in my mid- to late twenties,
  there was also a competitive element in my shoplifting.  It wasn’t
  so much a drive for acceptance in the way that the psychologists on
  that radio program described the teenage shoplifting, as it was a form
  of oneupmanship, of blowing people’s minds.  I loved going into
  stores with other people, never getting out of their sight, and coming
  out with loads of stuff that not even my companions had seen me
  take.  I think most people tend to enjoy expressing talents and
  demonstrating skills, and I excelled at shoplifting.

  By the time I was thirty, shoplifting wasn’t sport.  It became,
  rather, a technique of last resort, reserved for times of need.  I
  had evolved from a professional shoplifter, through a competitive
  phase, and into a subsistence level of occasional shoplifting when
  funds were short.  I went on like that for a period of years,
  until a crisis that was both emotional and economic triggered a new
  phase during which I was going out looking for certain targets, and
  spending more time on my shoplifting than a person would spend
  at a regular job. 

  That phase lasted only as long as I felt vulnerable, felt that my
  survival was threatened, and it involved some specific types of items I
  stole for exchange, in addition to the subsistence shoplifting of food
  and other personal needs.  As I reflected on that in the light of
  what I had learned on The Infinite Mind,
  I realized that fear had been the trigger for that hyperactive phase of
  shoplifting.  I remember being scared silly, and seeing the
  stealing as a means to get back to safety.  As soon as I’d gotten
  into a safe situation, I contented myself with the low cash flow I
  could generate from my arts, and the food I could produce from foraging
  and my garden.

  What I have subsequently learned about fear and its effects on the
  limbic system makes what I was feeling and doing then make a lot of
  sense to me.  It also reinforces my resolve to transcend
  fear.  Whether it was driving me away from people and into
  isolation, or urging me into inappropriate relationships, or when it
  was keeping me from stealing food when I was hungry or driving me into
  exhaustion stealing on a professional level, fear never helped me,
  never worked to my benefit.
  

  * I say I am “semi-retired” because I’m not shoplifting now but still
  have the skills to do so and might at some later date be impelled by
  circumstances to assess the risk attendant upon doing without some item
  I cannot afford to buy as being greater than the risk imposed by
  stealing  it.  In other words, my need would have to be great.

  • 6:21 pm
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