The Steal (28 page)

Just as there is no agreement about whether these groups help, there is none about how to treat kleptomania. While selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)—the drug category that includes Prozac—work for depressed people, there has only been one SSRI study on kleptomania, at Stanford, in 2002. But the prognosis the team published in 2007 in the
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry
was dim. They observed: “Kleptomania has no definitive treatment” and “kleptomania . . . may respond to various medications.” Over the past fifteen years, fluoxetine, topiramate, naltrexone, fluvoxamine, valproic acid, lithium, tricyclic antidepressants, trazodone, and buspirone have sometimes performed well and sometimes less well in studies on kleptomaniacs. These tiny studies—some used as few as three people—can hardly be called conclusive.

The paucity of research boils down to dollars and to the stigma surrounding shoplifting. Drug companies are not going to make money by curing kleptomania. Yet shoplifting crops up as a symptom of many types of mental illnesses—bipolar disorders and anxiety disorders as well as substance abuse, eating disorders, and depression. Eric Hollander, one of the research scientists most influential in promoting brain chemistry (as opposed to society or personality) as kleptomania’s cause, is the lead author of many articles about impulsivity, which he describes as “a core behavioral symptom domain that cuts across a vast range of psychiatric disorders and contributes to various public health problems.”

When the
DSM V
is published in 2013, it may group kleptomania with other behavioral and substance addictions. Hollander favors adding diagnoses to the encyclopedia, explaining, “There was a decision to recommend grouping the behavioral and substance addictions together into one unified category.” But in a letter titled “Warning on the Road to the
DSM V
,” Dr. Allen Frances, formerly the head of the
DSM IV
task force, argued against creating new categories of disease out of these old vices: “None of these suggestions is remotely ready for prime time as officially recognized mental disorders.”

Whereas there is a good deal of empirical research on alternative remedies for depression, no one has spoken of using these remedies for shoplifting. Biofeedback, which measures brain waves, has never been mentioned as a treatment for shoplifters. Nor have I ever heard about Saint-John’s-wort or acupuncture being applied to stop shoplifting as they are applied to people suffering from depression. I found only one shoplifter who hypnotized himself. Imaginal desensitization, which has been found to cure gamblers, was studied on shoplifters in the 1970s and 1980s. Two small peer-reviewed studies suggested that the technique, which forces shoplifters to envision the negative consequences of the crime, might help people stop.

But asked the secrets of conquering their illness, ex-shoplifters give mundane answers: yoga, diet, exercise. Many grab on to New Age cults or adopt self-esteem dogma. Now in her midforties, married for decades with three children, Susie, a stay-at-home mom who lives with her husband in a prosperous suburb of a large midwestern city, described stopping shoplifting as “a journey.” She traced her crime to her mother’s rages, her father’s coldness, and her childhood isolation. Like many adults who began shoplifting as children, she returned to it when things went bad. In the 1990s, she lost some money in investment. “It was my inheritance. I was mad. And I went right back into [shoplifting] like I had never stopped. I got to the point where it was every day. I wanted to quit but I didn’t know how.” And then she got caught. “I was out of my mind. I said to my husband, ‘You have to do the shopping. I can’t do this.’ I had to pay a $250 fine.”

In 2002, while working out at her gym, Susie met a woman who belonged to a self-help group and who encouraged her to sign up for seminars in which members discussed their “innermost secrets.” Susie told me: “I said, ‘I can’t tell you my innermost secret—I’ll tell you my second secret.’ But they were on me, they made me say it even though I said, ‘I can’t talk about it—it’s really painful.’ ” Next, Susie discovered Terry Shulman, who advised her to give her shoplifted stuff to charity, but not to take a tax deduction for it. “It makes you feel like Robin Hood,” she said.

When she “outgrew” Terry, as she put it—by which she meant she grew impatient with his methods—she read a book online:
Why Honest People Shoplift or Commit Other Acts of Theft
, by Canadian forensic psychologist Will Cupchik. She flew her family to Toronto, where Cupchik performed what Susie now understands to be Gestalt therapy: He made her itemize everything she had ever shoplifted; he asked her to analyze the photos in her family album; he instructed her to go on a spending spree, the first step of which was, in a surprisingly Abbie Hoffmanish gesture, to rip up a $5 bill, except Cupchik told Susie that henceforth she would buy everything at full price. After she looked at photos and discovered that she liked the one in which she wore a longer hairstyle, he advised her to grow out her locks to boost her self-confidence. Susie described Cupchik, who charges roughly $1,000 a day, as “expensive but worth it.”

Perhaps the most controversial therapy used to deter shoplifting is exposure and response prevention (ERP). Historically applied to drug addiction and alcoholism patients, ERP recalls the Ludovico technique in
A Clockwork Orange
, which dissuaded Alex from violence by feeding him nausea-inducing drugs and making him watch acts that earlier gave him pleasure. ERP has been tested on behavioral addictions, with widely varying results. Advocates say it works “like a recipe.” A counselor at an in-patient facility using the therapy described it. A shoplifter is brought into a small, darkened room with a couch and a coffee table. There she is sat down and asked a series of questions—a “cognitive script”—to impel her to think about how stealing will affect her family and friends. The darkness lulls the shoplifter into a trancelike state; her pulse is taken. Next, the counselor escorts her on an imaginary shopping trip, describing objects that she is drawn to. Sometimes he spreads them out on the table in front of her.

In the case of a hardware shoplifter, the counselor recalled, it was, “wrenches, hammers, shovels, even though she had plenty of money.” This process goes on—sometimes for weeks—until the shoplifter is deemed ready to go on a real shopping trip. By then, she might be desensitized to the hand tools that once overmastered her.

But can any of these methods, even one that sounds like a séance or a movie, dissuade shoplifters from a crime that feels good? A shimmering passage in Dostoevsky’s novella
The Gambler
in which young Alexei Ivanovich loses his fortune at the roulette table for the first time lays out how the attraction of such risks could overpower every rational “cure.”

Shoplifters expect more from their crime than it can ever give, just as Alexei expected more from the dice than even snake eyes could provide. In the store lies the stuff of dreams, which might disappoint if you did anything as pedestrian as buying. But shoplifting differs from gambling. In these dire times more than one political hopeful has proposed blackjack riverboats to close budget deficits or add to Social Security’s diminishing pot, but it would be absurd to think that any elected official would suggest enticing shoplifting games to do the same.

Then, too, Americans have stretched rehabilitation’s possibilities to sex offenders, prostitutes, gamblers, shy people, people with restless legs syndrome. But the idea of rehabilitating shoplifters, though it leans heavily on American faith in the march of progress and in second chances, may never gain the acceptance that other types of addictions have earned. There is too much resistance to seeing stealing as just another appetite. Besides, not every shoplifter can be rehabilitated.

SLS Residential is a private clinic in Brewster, New York, which no sign identifies. The main building resembles the other Victorian homes lining the leafy road in this depressed town off Route 84 just over the Connecticut border, not far from the Danbury Mall. Only a low picket fence separates the facility from its neighbors.

Elizabeth, whom I met at SLS shortly after I began work on this book, is one of the apparently unstoppable shoplifters. Four years ago, the then thirty-five-year-old daughter of well-to-do parents received a Solomonic choice from a judge in the state where she had most recently shoplifted: She could either spend another three months in a drug program in the county jail, where she had already spent fifty-six days (she was also at the time a drug addict) or she could spend one year in a treatment facility of her choice. If she opted for the latter, she would be on probation for ten years.

Elizabeth chose the path all but the most sainted would take: She elected to go to a treatment facility. Her parents helped her find SLS, which is not for those who depend on Blue Cross Blue Shield. The average cost is $400 a day, but it varies depending on how intensive the “residency,” how long, and what kind of care the “resident” subscribes to. Although most leave after two to three months, Elizabeth stayed for over two years, until, according to her, her parents suggested she try a less expensive cure. She checked out of SLS and got a job in a nearby town.

Elizabeth and I spent several afternoons in the SLS building called the Carriage House talking about her story. Fluent in psychology, she attributes her shoplifting in part to childhood rootlessness. “Back and forth, back and forth,” is how she described the many moves from East Coast to West Coast and back. She had a round, friendly face, brown eyes, and brown hair swept into a scrunchy. Though she complained she was gaining weight from the SLS food, she looked as though she might break in two. A hearing aid was wedged in one ear, and an iPod dangled around her neck. She wore long sleeves and pants to hide her many tattoos, orange Keds, and a green David Yurman ring, a garnet ring and bracelet, and a heart and diamond necklace. Her ears were pierced multiple times, and in one hole was a silver earring flipping the bird.

Elizabeth had shoplifted every piece of jewelry she was wearing except for that silver earring. “They got some of my stuff, and I get to keep some of their stuff,” she said, adding that while she was in jail, someone threw away all her earthly possessions and “liberated” her cat. For a minute, she looked like she was going to cry. “If you boil off the sauce, you get a reduction. That’s what I’m left with.”

Some of Elizabeth’s earliest memories involve stealing. At age four, she stole the family babysitter’s toothpaste, which she felt entitled to, since the babysitter lived in her house. Next she stole a Snoopy Band-Aid from a Hallmark store, but she got caught and returned it. Her dad was at soccer practice with her brother; although her mother says she has forgotten the theft, Elizabeth remembers conspiring with her to keep it secret. During her early adolescence, Elizabeth shoplifted on and off. Stores caught her a few times, but hardly anything compared with the “380,000 other times I got away with it.”

Elizabeth explained her technique. “You watch the salespeople. You pretend. You manipulate. You act like ritzy clients. You dress appropriately. You have self-confidence like ‘I own the place.’ ”

Elizabeth shoplifted books, art supplies, and food. “I hated wasting money on food,” she said. “I would binge and purge. I would switch prices. Shoplifting was my comfort food,” she said. After graduating from college with a 3.0 grade point average in her major, social psychology, she moved back home and enrolled as an MA candidate in a program in exercise physiology. Two years later, she checked into a private clinic for an eating disorder and for burning herself. She began to recover memories of her father abusing her. A few weeks before the shoplifting spree that landed her in jail in 2005, Elizabeth checked into a motel. In the back of her mind, she was planning to go to the mall to shoplift. Her parents were only paying her rent but not expenses, and so, Elizabeth told herself, they drove her to steal. By the time her mother visited after Thanksgiving, she had unraveled further. Although she was going to therapy once a week, she had cycled through five hostess jobs in four weeks. At the same time, she dreamed that she could change her life. She planned to enroll in a graphic design program in January.

One explanation Elizabeth gave for shoplifting was that it reminded her of the childhood years she spent shopping with her mother. “It was a fun-loving activity: creative, comforting, fulfilling, theatrical,” she said, adding that when her mother came to visit and they went to the mall, if her mother didn’t buy her anything, she wondered, as she often did, whether it was because she was too fat. Elizabeth, who weighed ninetyfive pounds, knew she should be grateful for her mother’s company. But the “old” feeling of “you must show me love through objects” haunted her, even though rationally she knew that it was silly.

Elizabeth’s mother returned home. A few days later, Elizabeth found herself in a Saks Fifth Avenue in a mall. She looked around and thought, “I want it all. The Chanel and different little boutiques like on the first floor, purses and shoes and accessories, and I want one of each. I want to be Paris Hilton and walk in and money is no object.” She warmed up by shoplifting from a few other stores and then returned to Saks, where she took thirteen Burberry scarves in different shades of plaid, a bottle of Dior Addict perfume, and a Dior eye shadow and then, “exhilarated,” she tried to leave the store. The moment she stepped outside, security grabbed her. She did not cry, but she felt ashamed and disappointed, although mostly she was mad at herself for being sloppy. In the security office, she signed a waiver saying that she would return the merchandise. She spent a couple of days in jail. Her parents paid the bond.