Shoplifting: Work, Agency, and Gender

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2011 6: 159 originally published online 2 May 2011Feminist CriminologyGail A. Caputo and Anna King

Shoplifting: Work, Agency, and Gender

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FCX402815 FCX6310.1177/1557085111402815Caputo and KingFeminist Criminology

1Rutgers University, Camden, NJ

Corresponding Author:Gail A. Caputo, Rutgers University, 405-7 Cooper Street, Camden, NJ 08102 Email: [email protected]

Shoplifting: Work, Agency, and Gender

Gail A. Caputo1 and Anna King1

Abstract

Often described as “pink collar,” shoplifting is crime thought to be dominated by women. While there is evidence of gender discrimination in the crime’s availability to women and that drug addiction as well as personal resources motivate individuals to choose it, the gendered nature of this work (the “how” of the work) is not further elaborated in the literature. The occupational processes of the crime have also largely been omitted from research. The goal of the article is to describe the “job” of shoplifting and how it may be “gendered” by examining the ways individual women talk about the crime.

Keywords

women and crime, shoplifting, gender

Shoplifting as Work

Women shoplifters who are motivated economically use the crime as a job to earn money. Situating crime as “work” means to examine its occupational dimensions. The idea of conceptualizing deviance or criminal behavior in occupational terms is not new. Polsky’s (1969) research on deviance as work brings to life the social and tech-nical world of pool hustlers who rig billiard games for income. He documents the skills necessary, the status hierarchies, patterned social interaction, varied techniques used, risks, and external stigma. Peter Letkemann (1973) uses the same approach to study safe crackers, unfolding the work using occupational terms such as profession, specialization, apprenticeship, and skill. Just as workers in conventional occupations learn through experience and example, compete in the marketplace, adapt to new technologies, and interact in a social world, so do workers who “do” crime. Workers in criminal and deviant jobs gain experience and learn skills, sometimes in a process



160 Feminist Criminology 6(3)

of tutelage. They contribute to and are affected by an economy, and they often manage or compete with others, face unique stressors, and participate in social networks (see, for example, Klockars, 1974; McCarthy & Hagan, 1995; Padilla, 1992; Steffensmeier, 1986; Sullivan, 1989; Sutherland, 1937).

Even the drug-addicted offender can move beyond the “nuts and bolts of their chosen trade(s) to master the subtleties of these criminal enterprises with finesse more charac-teristic of a craftsman” (Faupel, 1986, p. 78). Crime committed for income is a form of work that embodies the same basic structures of work that are not criminalized. Framing the individuals who engage in this type of behavior as people doing a “job” creates a nonnormative space in which actions, motivations, and techniques can be ana-lyzed without preconception and stigma. In doing so, some (see, for example, Caputo, 2008) have been able to provide a more nuanced and complex picture of the identities that sustain such activities.

In the tradition of the sociology of work and occupations, Gale Miller (1978) was one of the first scholars to consider women in deviant occupations as “workers” moti-vated by monetary rewards. He profiles the occupational dimensions of deviant vocations including stripping, sex work, gambling, loan sharking, fortune telling, and burglary. Explaining that while the hustles are socially different from one another and from legal or conventional work, Miller details how each of them involves basic elements of legal work that can also be analyzed along social and economic dimensions. While their social and economic world may be different from teachers or janitors, women who take on deviance for money or crime jobs do it very much like conventional workers do—completing tasks, managing stress, and participating in socialization inside and outside the “occupation.” They make thoughtful decisions to become involved just as women in conventional occupations justify taking on other professions (Bruckert, Parent, & Robitaille, 2003; Jeffrey & MacDonald, 2006; Wahab, 2004).

Opportunity Structure for Women and Deviant WorkMost accounts of women in deviant or illegal work focus on sex work or some variant thereof. This is in large part a consequence of sexism at play in the criminal labor market. Men dominate lucrative drug-dealing and -selling networks and although women may be able to sell drugs and participate in “male” crimes, their involvement is generally in limited capacity or confined to marginal or supportive roles; women’s work choices are often restricted to selling sex or other often low-level, highly gen-dered or stigmatized alternatives (see Anderson, 2005; Bourgois, 1989; Bourgois & Dunlap, 1993; Fagan, 1994; Inciardi, Lockwood, & Pottieger, 1993; Inciardi & Surratt, 2001; Maher, 1997, 2004; Maher & Curtis, 1992; E. Miller, 1986, J. Miller, 1995; Mullins & Wright, 2003.)

Steffensmeier (1983) calls this the “gendering” of crime work and relates it to a kind of “institutionalized sexism” or, as Trautner (2005) writes, “organizations and occupa-tions are often gendered—that is, they draw on notions of femininity or masculinity that are hegemonically defined” (p. 771). For example, Steffensmeier and Terry (1986)



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report that men objected to collaborating with women in crime because they perceived women as lacking certain social and personal capital thought to be essential for suc-cess at the endeavor—like trust and a willingness to take on risk. The men involved women only when necessary to make their own work more profitable. From a 3-year ethnographic study of 45 women drug users in New York, Maher and Daly (1996) similarly identify gender bias; none of the women owned or ran drug-selling businesses but; many took on work related to selling, albeit marginal to men’s. Maher (1997) notes, but for drug-addicted and criminally active women in a New York neighborhood where crack selling and use is pervasive, “sexwork [sic] was the only income-generating activity consistently available to women drug users in Bushwick” (p. 130). As the process of sexism in the urban drug culture perpetuates itself, continued demand makes sex work the most conveniently accessible means to earn income and sustain drug-use needs.

Contrary to this prevailing theme found in the illicit drug economy literature—that sex work is “women’s work” and that alternative deviant occupations such as shoplift-ing are simply too difficult for women to make happen—recent research suggests that women can and do approach other criminal activities as occupations. For instance, Caputo (2008) shows that drug-addicted women who engage in shoplifting as their primary criminal activity will cultivate systems in their neighborhood to make the crime profitable (e.g., create a customer base) and develop a system of transportation to retailers beyond the inner city working with “hacks” in a way that supports their shop-lifting work. However, it is up to women to find these not-so-obvious systems.

Opportunistic Use of Gender and AgencyOur effort in this gender analysis is to move past value judgments and traditional views of gender—the focus of this analysis is on how gender is used as a means to an end, just as shoplifting, selling stolen merchandise, or any hustle can be exploited for personal gain. As such, the ways that women engage in shoplifting circumvents gen-der as an “issue” and is taken as a demonstration of individual agency. Perhaps like many readers, these women do not narrate their personal identities in ways that con-fine them to any traditional role or notion of gender; rather they are flexible and adopt different behaviors naturally and comfortably when they decide to do so.

“Gendering” of legal and illegal occupations is most apparent where tasks, activi-ties, and dimensions of the work reinforce or challenge gender expectations. At the macro level, the organizational structure of work is thought to be patterned around masculinity, gender roles, and gender inequality. In this context, women are marginal-ized, power and advantage most often go to men, and day-to-day tasks are “masculinized” (see Acker, 1990; Britton, 2003). At the micro level, the “gendering” of an occupation is illustrated in how workers (or offenders) define key activities and characteristics in stereotypical gendered ways (Cassell, 1997; Dellinger, 2002; Moloney & Fenstermaker, 2002; Rupp, Taylor, & Shapiro, 2010; Sargent, 2009). For example, Pierce’s (1995) study of attorneys shows how the exceptional litigator is perceived as highly masculine




and sexualized—one who wins, competes, beats enemies, exploits weaknesses for per-sonal gain, takes decisive action, and persuades.

In the “doing gender” approach most notably tied to Messerschmidt (1993, 1995) and Miller (1998, 2002), gender is expressed in how men and women engage in crime and presumably in mundane activities. Things like committing street crime, participat-ing in sports, conducting research, and getting work done can be analyzed and under-stood from the perspective of a person’s gender and the prevailing ideas of what it means to act in a “feminine way” and a “masculine way.” The ways in which men and women think, act, and talk is gendered. For example, Messerschmidt (1993) reports that robbery is just another mechanism to express gender, namely, hegemonic mascu-linity. Similarly, Miller (1998) explains how women express gender—femininity and masculinity—in how they make robbery happen. This perspective that a social status (like gender or race or class, for example) affects and is carried through action and behavior can be referred to as “structured action.” This duality of gender roles approach is flawed.

When women step out of anticipated gender roles and behave in masculine ways (i.e., engaging in violence or economic street crime), the lines between femininity and masculinity can become blurred and the prevailing notion of what it means to “be feminine” or “act masculine” has to be refined. Rather than to reevaluate the gender role approach—what Miller (2002) calls “challenging the gender dualism” (p. 441)—scholars might force a newly conceptualized gender role to account for differences. For example, Messerschmidt (1995) describes how girls who take on a male persona in the gang must have a different notion of femininity or what it means to act like a girl—one necessarily closer to what we know of as “masculine.”

However, rather than explain away this difference using gender roles, we argue that this difference can be interpreted as a fluid, natural expression of both feminine and masculine traits, sometimes leaning toward femininity and sometimes toward male-ness. It could have just as easily and convincingly be situated as example of how women can be versatile, drawing from a set of behavioral resources that demonstrates not only their agency but also the fluidity of their gender expression. For instance, Miller (2002) makes a convincing argument that challenges the gender-role dualism and supports the idea that women in crime have agency. She argues that what is a normative conceptu-alization of maleness and femaleness depends on who one is and their position in the broader social structure, that what is feminine and masculine is often very similar, and that gender action is not static but dynamic with variations in masculinity and feminin-ity. Miller calls this “gender crossing” and reported it in how girls used a masculine identity when talking about their involvement in street gangs (p. 443).

This makes intuitive sense to us. Drug-addicted women hustling for money in an urban drug world—the participants of this study—should have different views of fem-ininity (e.g., how to act as feminine women, what acceptable gendered strategies are) than women living in penthouses on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. From experi-ences, cultural expectations, social position, and more, women and men have the ability to use a dynamic, fluid expression of gender in the everyday life. This might



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change with circumstances and can be captured in the accounts of how women use shoplifting as work.

The following analysis builds on the ideas of shoplifting as work, recognizes human agency, and offers an explicit gender focus, showing the fluidity of gender expression as women talk about their crime work. The focus is on the organizational and technical dimensions of shoplifting—from the perspective of the women themselves.

MethodThis article uses interview data from an ethnographic study that was conducted by the lead author between 2002 to 2006 on women substance abusers who financed drug addictions and other daily needs through the crime of shoplifting. The study compared and contrasted women shoplifters and sex workers on a variety of topics, such as path-ways and turning points to drugs and criminality, criminal specialization, and how crime can be occupational.

The participants volunteered for the study by responding to solicitations and posted advertisements on the streets and transportation centers of Camden, New Jersey, from the county jail in Camden and from a halfway house prison release center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The study also involved snowball sampling. Many of the women, espe-cially those from the halfway house, reported they were inclined to participate after hearing positive comments about the study from women already interviewed. Recruiting and interviewing these women required careful attention to procedure and requisite human subject protections. The authors had no involvement or relationship with the women in any social or professional capacity. The women were reassured that their participation was entirely unrelated to their criminal justice status, that participation was voluntary, and that they could end involvement at any time. Purposively drawn to include only those identified as drug dependent and those who had relied on shop-lifting or sex work as their chief source of income, the sample did not represent all women involved in drugs and criminal or deviant work or any other group beyond the women studied. Names used throughout this article are pseudonyms to protect the identity of the women.

Interviews with the women encouraged them to tell their life stories, detailing how they experienced the world, including shoplifting. Taking place in various locations (including in jail, at a university office, in the street, at the halfway house), the inter-views gathered rich information about crime deviant work involvement in what the women describe as their specialty—shoplifting or sex work. Probing questions and, at times, multiple interviews captured the more nuanced information. To minimize any potential legal complications to confidentiality, interviews with women in custody focused on past criminality rather than the present involvement or future plans. The interviews resulted in a wealth of intimate data that allow for an unusually comprehen-sive analysis into these women’s criminal acts. Transcribed into text by research staff, the tape-recorded interviews were reviewed and coded thematically around themes voiced by the women about their crime specialization, such as agency, risk management,




and self-perceptions. Gender is a critical component to analysis. As a group, the women in this study share the social status of “female,” a socially derived definition affecting life in every way. Gender lends insight into traumatic life experiences a girl or woman encounters, how she may cope, and, for the purpose of this article, how she might turn criminal deviance into work.

This article draws data from 12 women in the study whose primary criminal offense is shoplifting. At the time of the interviews, they were self-described drug addicts, engaged in the crime of shoplifting for income to sustain drug habits and to meet other financial needs. Their lives before drug-addiction and shoplifting were marked with abuse and trauma in many cases occurring during adulthood but often stemming from childhood experiences. They were raised with alcohol abuse and, with some excep-tions, exposed to domestic violence and victims of multiple harms including physical and emotional abuse in the childhood home. Primarily White, the women were raised in neighborhoods they usually described as working or middle class. Many graduated high school, took conventional jobs, and had families. It was late adolescence and early adulthood that the women turned to crime and other means to support their ongoing use of what they termed hard drugs like cocaine, heroin, and crack. Their jobs and family life took a back seat to drugs. Many spent time on the streets, homeless or “sleeping from pillow to pillow,” and nearly all of them have been incarcerated multiple times. Their criminal histories range from minor possession offenses to violent crimes. Since the start of their drug use, which in some cases had spanned 14 to 35 years, their lives had revolved around getting and using drugs. At some point, the women turned to shoplifting as the primary mechanism for earning money for drugs and other basic needs. This article tells their story of how they turn the crime of shop-lifting into work.

Analysis and FindingsWhen their drug use became addiction, the women in this study became embedded in urban drug cultures within Philadelphia and Camden. These places are among the most economically deprived and socially disordered areas of the cities where the drug trade thrives. Operating there is a lively economy that is organized around the drug trade. Shoplifting is one of many hustles within that economy and the one chosen by these women as their criminal work specialization. They talk about shoplifting in occupa-tional and gender terms, framing it as a job and talking about the occupational dimen-sions in both feminine and masculine ways. Alice for instance, uses the terminology, not of a hustle or graft but of a business: “There’s an economy out there that wants the product. And if one person can do that product, I took it like selling Avon. It’s just like running a sale in the department store.”

Not only does Alice describe the deviant work of shoplifting in very occupational terms (i.e., economy, product, sale, etc.) but also does she express a desire to see it as a particularly feminine occupation—being an “Avon lady.” Like the cosmetic



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saleswomen in her uniform of pink, best known in the 1950s, Alice draws on imagery that is both feminine and professional.

Alice and the other women may have been involved in other types of crimes from time to time and even worked in legal jobs, but shoplifting has become their primary source of income, perhaps in part because it gives them a sense of mastery and of “working smart.” As Veronica says, “I considered myself a professional . . . I would think that it was a job. On a day alone, I could make like $300. You’re talking about three hours of work.”

Like Veronica, who seems to be making a cost-benefit analysis in her evaluation of her time for money, Sandy also sees herself as a professional shoplifter. For her, being a “professional” shoplifter is a way of earning solid, dependable profits and is thus work that deserves to be taken seriously:

I’ve been doing it all my life. I’m a professional. It would take me 2 hours to make what I would make in 40 hours. So it is an easier way to support a habit and everything else. It pays for wherever I stay at, for food and transportation, clothing, everything. There’s times where I’ll do it specifically just for the money for drugs, but then there’s times I have to pay the bills or I owe a debt. I’ve even shoplifted to give money to other people, ’cause I know I can go back to the stores . . . I make a good sum of money shoplifting.

Sandy, like Alice and Veronica, views the crime of shoplifting as a good occupa-tion that gives her the ability to provide not only for herself on a consistent basis but also for others. Shoplifting for income is complex work, requiring tasks to completion and is gendered along organizational and technical lines. In their descriptions of shop-lifting, the women use terms like economy, profession, sales, customers, income and they hint at themes like career, technology, and efficiency of work—terms that can be used to depict conventional business work. They talk not only about competition, risk, individuality, status, and power but also about the importance of relationships, con-cern for the welfare and well-being of people, and about social presentation and interaction—terms illustrative of both feminine and masculine characteristics of work. Through organizational and technical aspects of the job, what women express and often what they do not express reveals numerous connections between gender, shop-lifting, and, as we propose, individual agency.

Organizational Dimensions of ShopliftingThe organizational dimensions of shoplifting for the women in this research involve working relationships with two criminally involved groups who are primarily male dominated. From the inside, women talk about these groups in relational and profes-sional terms, whereas an outsider’s take might indicate male dependence and gender inequality in the accomplishment of shoplifting.




The first group is locally known as hacks, drivers, or rides, those (usually male) city residents whose own criminal work is that of an illegal taxi driver. Dealings with hacks grow out of the shoplifter’s need to travel under cover, to get away from retail locations quickly, and to customers directly. Shoplifters who need to travel to retail establishments and who are without their own vehicles might use public transporta-tion, but this is risky and inefficient. Hacks are the best available alternative for any shoplifter without means of transportation who wants to work quickly and efficiently. Hacks are using their own vehicles as taxi cabs, and these vehicles look like any other car in the neighborhood, something important to shoplifters who want to go unnoticed. As participants in urban drug cultures, hacks are everywhere, willing to negotiate transportation for just about any reason with the promise of a profit. For shoplifters, hacks are hired to get them out of the neighborhood, to the stores, and then back to customers where they can cash in their goods.

Customarily, hacks take an equal share of a shoplifter’s profit without taking on much risk. Arguably this is an inequality, an unfair division of labor, and, as men dominate the work, even sexist. However, Carmela talks about it in a feminine light, using relational language powerfully defining herself as a highly favored client to the hacking community effectively minimizing any hint of unfairness.

I would probably right now say they call me the queen of shoplifting . . . I got hacks that I could call and they’d take me out right now. I’ve seen three people, three hacks arguing with each other because they wanted to take me out, and I went with the fourth one! . . . anyone on the street will take you ’cause they’re getting half. They’re hacking for drugs [driving to support their own drug addic-tions], so instead of getting $5 and take someone across town, they’re taking you to shoplift; they’re gonna make a hundred or more. They’ll bring you wher-ever you wanted to go. Most of my drivers are good friends of mine now.

Carmela keeps hacks competing for her business because she maintains relation-ships with them. “You have to take care of your driver,” Francine similarly remarked, because they will take care of you in return in their loyalty and going out of their way to keep your business. To take care of hacks can mean keeping the drug-using hack high, as Candee describes:

Say I take a hack and we go and then cash in and then I want to look for another place [to shoplift]. Sometimes the hack gets sick [from a need for drugs], so I just go to make a quick hundred. I go in [the store], run out, cash in, have everything you want. We got the gas, we got the tolls, and we get some drugs so we’re both not sick no more. Then we go get the next stores.

From the women’s perspective, this common occurrence of the hack coming down off drugs or “getting sick” is generally not viewed as the undue burden of an incompe-tent partner; rather the women simply transform the hack from an “other” into a “we,”



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and carry on with the task at hand. As Candee says, “the hack gets sick,” Candee gets the fix, and then, “we’re both not sick anymore.” This relational approach to problem solving is often seen as a particularly feminine way of being (see Gilligan, 1983, 1988).

Shoplifters may give away goods they steal and they sometimes barter for other goods, such as drugs. However, to make the work a profitable source of income, shop-lifters sell to buying customers. Customers can be friends, social acquaintances, even strangers. Customers can also be businesses of any sort. Customers that purchase rou-tinely and dependably are the mainstay of the professional shoplifter. The effective management of customers is an important distinction between shoplifters who call the crime work, like the women studied here, and others whose involvement is not occu-pational but explained by various motives.

The women in this study developed a base of customers over a period of time, just as a supplier would in the conventional world of business. Many of them started out using other, less efficient methods, such as the “exchange for cash” method, the “steal-return” method, or the “receipt for cash” method. Using the first method, shoplifters return to stores with the stolen merchandise and negotiate a merchandise return for cash as an honest shopper would do with a receipt. At retailers with strict policies limit-ing returns, shoplifters may use the “receipt for cash method.” Using this approach, shoplifters scour parking lots and sidewalks taking discarded receipts for merchandise they then shoplift and return for cash. This method also requires them to shoplift the merchandise. Depending on the number of receipts they can locate, shoplifters might have a limited set of choices about what to shoplift, or they may be able to select from a range of differently priced goods. The “buy-steal” is a variation to this method, but it involves a valid purchase and a team of at least two shoplifters. Patricia sometimes worked this way with her partner.

He’d go in Home Depot and he’d have orders, like what everybody wanted so what he would do was he would go in and buy it. He would get money what was called flash cash. He’d get money for what he needed to get. And then at the same time I’d be setting up the same thing in another cart and he’d be walking down then he’d go through the aisle, pay for it and get the receipt. I’d be like two carts back getting ready to walk through the garden section with the same receipt with the same items in the cart, go out, come back in and return it with the receipt. So now, we call it a buy-steal.

However, when shoplifters decide to collect their goods, earning regular profits necessitates a solid customer base. This requires talent at sales and negotiation, hard work that brings plenty of reward. Sandy has created a specialty niche for herself, hav-ing assembled a steady stream of customers for her select product. Having done this, she now enjoys a kind of elevated status in this area of “sales”:

I’m the top man I should say. I sell it to them and then they sell it. The stores sell. . . . I have a small quantity of people that actually use ’em [comforter and




sheet sets that she shoplifts] for personal use—maybe four or five people. Most people resell what I sell ’em. I have a lot of men that buy ’em for their wives and a lot of women that buy ’em in bulk to resell ’em. A lot of people pack ’em up and send to Puerto Rico, they send ’em back to their families. I have a lot of men that send ’em back to their country and sell ’em for double what they’re worth over here.

Not only has Sandy carved out a particular product to steal and sell, she has also been good at developing a diverse array of buyers to keep her product moving, earning her the “top man” status which she enjoys. The types of transactions that Sandy per-forms with customers are two step processes that all of the women engaged in. Normally, the women negotiate a sale before setting out to the stores, taking orders from custom-ers, and then returning to close the deal with the merchandise in hand. Esther explains how she makes this happen:

I’d go and make the sales first. I’d say. “Listen, this is what I got; put your order in; when you gonna have the money?” So I could just collect the money. You know I would definitely have a sample. I’d have the sample out to show ’em because you’re taking care of business. I had a rapport with some businesses. . . . Oh man, a good day would be something like over $500 [of income], and I was giving away more than what I was smoking. I made a real job of this crime.

Like a wholesale supplier to retailers, shoplifters can improve their status position and increase their earnings by maintaining an inventory of goods and by proactively marketing new merchandise to their customers.

Technical Dimensions of ShopliftingAnother critical dimension of shoplifting is the technical and this involves three main parts: preparation before the shoplifting event, shoplifting, and risk manage-ment. Shoplifting for income involves sequential steps to complete from start to fin-ish. Preparation, or planning, is a serious first step. A shoplifter must decide what she is going to shoplift and at which retail stores, how she will travel, and her options for turning over the goods for cash. The plan might be simple—travel to one store, shop-lift something, travel to her customer, and make the sale. It may be more complicated—make a number of stops at different stores to shoplift a variety of goods for several customers throughout the day relying on two or more drivers for transportation. One thing is clear, as Sandy’s account illustrates, there is an almost-strategic-like level of precalculation and forethought involved in the business of shoplifting for these women:

I entertain the thought probably for like two hours before I go, make sure I figure what store I want to go to, or what I want to take, or where I’m going to take it



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to sell it. I think, like, every level when I do it. I knew the stores didn’t open till 10:00, so I went to the mall, like, ten of 10:00 before the doors even opened. I thought about what I was gonna do; I knew I wanted to go in and grab two quilts because I know I needed money for a couple of days. When I go into the stores it’s already preplanned.

Sandy’s account is typical of these women who call shoplifting “work”; they do not enter stores without first planning what they will do, where, and how. Time is a resource. The more time a shoplifter has available to get work done, the more profit-able it can be for her. Typically, these shoplifters determine the stores they will target based on the merchandise they plan to take. Then, they dress for work. They pay atten-tion to their appearance. Unlike most professions, the proper attire for the work setting of shoplifters can change vastly even on the same day. Dress for work on one day might be ultra casual, like jeans and a T-shirt, or dressy slacks and a blouse with makeup. The next day could require an entirely different uniform. Shoplifters who are believable know how to successfully blend in and belong. To become believable, they must carefully select attire for their work, the clothing, accessories, and even makeup. The correct image changes depending on the store they are headed to and even the merchandise they target. One shoplifter always donned a wig and another had a knack for using makeup to her advantage. When Esther shoplifts for her customers in auto repair, she acts the part; her use of makeup and dress, and appealing to a sense of chiv-alry on behalf of the largely male-dominated auto-repair shop employees, is a femi-nine approach.

I had one keys in this hand, and I tear the yellow pages out and fold it up and clench it between my teeth and go, see that’s a diversion cause that’s what color the receipts are for one, right? And the keys, like I’m driving, you know what I mean? And I got a couple dollars in my hand to make it look like I got some money. And I go to Pep Boys looking very, very, very angry, very angry. I walk over to the batteries, flip the $98 battery, the tops off, take the other one. . . . and put one in each hand and walk out of Pep Boys store, turn around, and some-times on a feisty day, I would turn around and look as if to say I which one of you all would say something to me. Wait, hold up, and on a feisty day I would say [to an employee], “Come here, you; come help me here. Don’t you see I’m an older woman? Come help me with this to my car.” I’m serious, but see I got skilled with this. . . . I got skilled. There’s an art to it.

Preparation also means gearing up to take on the criminal risk. For shoplifters, steering clear of incapacitation means they need to worry about apprehension by store security, deal with limits imposed by retailers who ban them from stores, and avoid incarceration. Shoplifting specialists must accept that each time they enter into the crime, they face apprehension, a “fifty-fifty chance” many of them reasoned. A com-mon mechanism the women employ to get ready to take on this risk is to use drugs to




take the edge off, to get ready. Francine calls getting high the “jump-off.” Lee explains how drugs fit into shoplifting:

You have to condition your mind to go in the store; you can’t go in there think-ing stupid you know. If you go in there thinking you’re going to get caught, then you’re going to get caught. You go in there thinking I’m gonna get this or I got to; well, not so much I gotta get it because desperation will get you caught too. If you go in there desperate, like if you’re sick on dope you shouldn’t go, because that makes you desperate. The object is to get well [use drugs] before you go. . . . You don’t think about goin’ to jail when you go in; you just think about getting over. That’s the main objective, to get over. . . . My heart skips a beat. . . . but that leaves, it has to go. . . . that initial entrance into the store. Almost like goin’ to war. . . . this is it, this is like a do-or-die situation. Just like going on stage, pull yourself together, man.

Clearly associated with masculine traits, courage and the ability to keep one’s head in the game are requisite skills; as Lee says, it’s like “going to war,” a “do-or-die situation” or maybe even like successfully executing a draw in football, action that involves aggressively attacking by faking out one’s opponent. Once ready to take on the risk, shoplifters enter stores and, the next phase, the shoplifting event. There, they put to work a range of skills to get what they need and get out of the store. As they work to complete the task, shoplifters like Carmela are hypervigilante in their awareness of the entirety of the shoplifting environment in an effort to accurately assess risk:

I have my mind on everything. I have my eyes in my mind on everything, on the speaker, when you call someone from customer service, anything and every-thing, ya know. You have to be aware of everything. . . . you can’t just go in there and be sloppy. If you want to get it done right, you have to know what you’re doing; you have to keep an eye on what you’re doing. . . . I act like a regular shopper, look to the sales, ask questions.

When inside the retail store, shoplifters have got to decide how long to stay to “make the slip” (conceal or otherwise take control of merchandise), “get over” (attract no suspicion), and “get out” of the store. Too little time seems too risky, because it usually raises suspicion. A very long time browsing a section of the store could seem like odd behavior for a typical shoplifter and is risky as well. The right amount of time to spend inside depends in large part on the type of store and the merchandise targeted. A quick visit to the auto parts store may be more ordinary than a lengthy browse there. An extensive look inside a department store that is having a sale might be more cus-tomary than a fast in and out.

Shoplifters at work have to adapt to changing circumstances while inside the store and they must do this under uncertainty and stressful conditions. The plan to exit the store might be foiled by the presence of a store employee, a shoplifter may know



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she was seen making the slip, or she may be held up unnecessarily if the merchandise she targeted is missing. In Lee’s comments, she describes how all of these considerations play a role in her determination of how much time she should spend in a store:

When you go in, you just think about getting over, that’s the main objective, to get over. And do you want to do it as quickly as possible, but don’t be stupid. Because if you spend too much time, it’s gonna draw attention to you. So you come in, get what you want and get out.

Lee is not merely reveling in the fun or excitement that may be associated with women breaking through traditional feminine gender roles (see Katz’s 1988 discus-sion of occasional shoplifters) by having the “daring” to be “bad”; in these accounts of shoplifting, women talk about enjoying a different set of feelings—those associated with mastery, a delay of gratification, and purposive action—individual agency.

Their skill also involves coming face-to-face with the risk they fear the most—being detected and apprehended. Shoplifters can make themselves appear so ordinary that their crime becomes invisible. Using their relational skills, women do this by interacting with employees of a store just as regular female shoppers might. Below, Sandy describes hav-ing gotten so good at this particular skill, that at one of the store’s she steals from most often, she regularly talks in a social manner with one of the employees:

I’ll talk to certain people; I don’t act shy, like, I don’t hide from anyone in the store. I go right up and look at the merchandise. I’ll talk to the lady who works there. . . . about new patterns they have, what’s on sale, or whatever, and as soon as she turns her back, walk out with it. . . . I’m acting like I am shopping, and that I have money to purchase what’s there, and I really don’t.

Nannie works on portraying herself as a casual, routine shopper too:

You have to blend in wherever so the people are all right. Things like that and they never suspect that you would do something like this. You could talk to people, kind of like what are you looking for. I mean con artist kind of things. You have to talk to people and make yourself believable. You have to be a good liar; that’s what it boils down to. You have to be able to sell yourself.

Just as a woodworker or a Wall Street broker does not display each of her skills all of the time, a shoplifter selects among a repertoire of skills using only those necessary for any given situation. This is efficiency of work. Nannie and Sandy use these more feminine techniques here that are echoed in all of the women’s accounts. At times, when the situation calls for it, they develop rapport or simply use their ability to “blend” and fit in—skills essential to getting “in and out” while avoiding detection.

The shoplifters in this study demonstrate strength in the area of flexibility when it comes to technique; they seem to understand that they do not always have to use




sophisticated technologies; rather they let situational factors guide them. In contradic-tion to some of the more aggressive or masculine techniques the women spoke about, such as Esther’s approach to auto store stealing or Francine’s account of having a “steel mind” that would keep her from getting “psyched” out, the women also rely on alternative techniques that draw on simpler methods such as hiding (of stolen goods) and restraint (in the amount of goods stolen).

Carmela, for instance, describes sometimes hiding merchandise within the inner part of a shopping cart with large, bulky items normally not bagged at all, such as bulk packages of paper towels or toilet paper rolls and cases of water or soda, lining the outer part of the cart:

Yeah, like I take carts of stuff out; the house is full of food. . . . Formula, dia-pers, aspirins, all different types of medication, Crest strips; they’ll [customers] actually take anything. . . . Right, so my cart is full with a little bit of everything. . . . my cart is probably like three, four hundred dollars a cart a shot. . . .I line around the sides with, like, bulk products, and I throw everything in the middle and then I’ll put a big thing of paper towels on top or something on top or a case of water. They don’t see what’s in the middle, right; they just see me walk-ing out with all bulk products.

This ability to shift between “hard” and “soft” techniques is not unique to Carmela’s account. Nannie describes using a cart, for instance, as well but in a different way. She describes shoplifting cases of Enfamil and Similac baby formula from supermarkets, which goes for US$6 to US$8 a can on the street, by carefully regulating the volume of her product to avoid detection:

You usually don’t get just one of them [cases of formula], but you don’t want to push it, you know what I mean. You don’t want to overflow the cart because if you go over the cart, they’ll be like oh my God what the hell is she doing? If you do it in moderation. . . . You just can’t get over how you walk right out the door.

In each of these accounts, the women describe relying on techniques that are not necessarily “theirs”—they do not describe signature ways they go about shoplifting; rather they evidence an ability to transcend macho or feminine notions of technique, relying on whatever method helps successfully manage the risk of getting caught.

The perception of risk depends on multiple skills and traits. For instance, another important technical skill shoplifters develop is their overall “sense” that danger is nearby. Sometimes referred to as a hunch, vibe, or instinct, the sensations of being watched—that danger is imminent, that things are not quite right—are emotional sig-nals or cues that help define one’s sense of risk. Sometimes these cues present as physical feelings of nausea. To trust these cues is the mark of a professional shoplifter.



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Tracy refers to this danger awareness as an instinct, a characteristic mostly associated with masculinity: “The thing is that you just know when you’re gonna get caught. It’s something that you feel. It’s something you have to follow your instinct.”

When a shoplifter perceives the risk of apprehension has increased or has become worrisome, the right course of action is to put contingency plans to work. One contin-gency plan is to abandon the crime. Monica said,

The thing with that is you just know when you’re going to get caught. It’s some-thing that you feel. It’s something you have to follow your instinct and just go ahead with it and take the chance that you might get caught and that’s how that works. . . . This is how that worked, if you were in the store, right and you think, before you hit that register and you feel like that, take it out, right there in front of them it don’t matter, put it back. I changed my mind, I got to go.

The cost of mismanaging risk is one’s freedom which is always on the line for pro-fessional shoplifters. Risk is uncertainty and sometimes even the best contingency plans fail to protect the shoplifter from the risk of apprehension. When this happens, as it has for all of the women in the study, shoplifters know that part of the businesses is to take in stride the criminal sanctions that come as a consequence of work.

Regardless of the particular strategy used, or its level of sophistication, the tech-niques these women use in shoplifting for income stress a self-reliant awareness that one can be both fearless when the situation calls for it and prudent, maintaining a keen awareness of others’ points of view in an effort to successfully negotiate risk. Being able to develop quasifriendships on the fly and adapting one’s self to various con-sumer environments quickly and easily is a theme that these women stressed in their accounts of the techniques they drew on regularly to shoplift successfully. In doing so, the women’s accounts seem to simultaneously draw on specific skills associated with both masculine and feminine characteristics.

Making Shoplifting WorkThe aim of this analysis is to contribute to existing knowledge of how women shop-lifters, as gendered subjects, understand the activity of stealing from stores and sell-ing. From the detailed accounts of drug-addicted women living and working in the Philadelphia-Camden area whose primary source of income is shoplifting, two pri-mary conclusions can be drawn. First, we found that women understand the crime of shoplifting for income as an occupation. Second, the women in this study organize and use techniques in its commission that are both feminine and masculine, express-ing an individual agency that transcends any obligation to gender roles. We discuss each of these findings and implications for future research in more detail below.

In these accounts, the women talk about the crime of shoplifting for income not only as a way to earn cash but also as something much more, a job or an occupation.




From this point of view, shoplifting can be aligned with nearly any other type of work from the legal (carpentry, accounting, teaching, or finance) to the illegal (loan shark-ing, prostitution, gambling, or embezzlement). What sets the different forms of work apart from one another has less to do with the illegal or deviant aspects of the behavior and more to do with the nuances of the particular occupation—the setting, the infor-mal and formal rules, the environment, the economic impact, technology, the risk negotiated, and so on.

Like legal workers, these women compete in the marketplace, carry through mun-dane tasks, cope with stress and uncertainty, keep up with changing technology, nego-tiate setbacks, develop innovative styles for greater efficiency, and employ tactics to maintain profit. To say then that women in professional shoplifting are powerless or thrown about by circumstance, unwilling or unable to take on complex tasks is not supported in these accounts. To the contrary, even with the burden of extreme personal struggles (e.g., drug addiction, trauma, and abuse), some women can be enterprising in crime, as this study illustrates. In other words, the study shows that women who rely on shoplifting for income see themselves as working professionals whose “job” goes beyond the distinction between illegal and legal economies.

As such, this analysis suggests a different conceptualization of the woman offender from the more popular image of the passive, hyperfeminized female criminal. Reflected in these accounts are active human agents who revel in the skills and social capital that they sow to establish themselves as successful operators in a horizontally organized structure that is embedded within a larger, male-dominated, and vertically organized underworld. Shoplifting demands skills such as an entrepreneurial spirit, a willingness to take on risk and engage in deviance, and strategic planning. The work itself involves things like contingency management, negotiation, customer relationships, product man-agement, and market analysis. Over time, shoplifters continue to learn and to expand their customer base, increase profits, and enjoy status. To do all of this, the women weave in and out of both masculine and feminine gender roles, accomplishing what-ever task is called for at the time (e.g., making quick alliances, taking care of hacks, averting detection, etc.) to make shoplifting work for them.

In sum, women shoplifting for income draw from the supply of goods from the legal economy, invoke illegal services of hacks, and sell to stores who themselves commit a crime buying and reselling stolen merchandise to legally purchasing custom-ers. Professional shoplifters who work in other places would conceivably have differ-ent limits and opportunities to get work done. Outside the inner city, for example, shoplifters who have their own transportation may earn higher profits than those who share proceeds with hacks, but having to drive themselves may add a stressor not felt by the urban shoplifter. In other locations too, shoplifters may not sell locally to cus-tomers that operate small corner stores or bodegas and may rely on an entirely differ-ent type of customer base. Learning how the work of shoplifting patterns to different social settings or about other crimes that cross legal and illegal economies would be informative areas for future research.



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Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

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Bios

Gail A. Caputo, PhD, is associate professor of criminology at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey. Her recent research focuses on women in trouble with the law and the sociology of crime and deviance. Her most recent book is Out in the Storm: Drug-Addicted Women Living as Shoplifters and Sex Workers (Northeastern University Press, 2008).

Anna King, PhD, is assistant instructor of criminal justice at Rutgers University. She earned her PhD at the University of Cambridge, England, and previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University. Her areas of expertise include attitudes toward crime and justice, women and crime policy, crime and the mass media, mixed methods, and program evaluation.



Shoplifting: Work, Agency, and Gender

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