While you read this post and weep for the future, I want to you think about all the things you've "borrowed" from establishments over the years...and post them in the commments. Don't fret. We're all family. Best heist wins!
(My list is pretty sorry. I'm what you would call...a scaryass--in the presence of my angelic nature.
Usually, the stuff that gets lifted happens spontaneously at checkout counters...they overlook an item, I overlook it too.)
There were always people I knew who had me scared for my future whenever we went out somewhere. If one of their asses got caught, they wouldn't say ish and I'd be in lockdown cryning to my mama while she calls me all kinds of dumb bastards and refuse to come and get me out.
The Fashion Thief
This 17-year-old is so obsessed with high fashion, he's willing to go to jail - repeatedly - for his shoplifting habit.
Kevahn Thorpe, described in a profile in New York magazine as "a slight 17-year-old standing no more than five foot seven" who lives with a single mother in a housing project, has only been shoplifting designer duds for a year, but in that time has managed to do serious damage. An honors student with an aptitude for Calculus, the teen quickly developed a taste for good clothes and stealing high-end merchandise became an addictive challenge.
[...]
The more wardrobe he accumulated, the easier it became to blend into high-end stores, and despite a series of arrests (and the fact that under New York law he's charged as an adult), jail time and a stint in a group home, he found his reputation as a style maven and his newfound status too heady to give up. He's been arrested literally dozens of times and stolen thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of clothing. Despite countless chances from sympathetic judges, his compulsive thieving finally lands him in jail for good.
[...]
What's so strange about this story - well, besides the teen's compulsion - is that for once it is not a story of the system failing someone, so much as society's influence resoundingly beating the system out. Quite simply, fashion, and what it connotes, have become more important to this boy than his freedom. Even though everyone knows his clothing is stolen, it no longer matters - so it's gone beyond projecting an image to giving the garments themselves an odd Talismanic power. In some ways it seems like the sympathetic judges with whom he deals want to go easy on him because the fetish seems to them so frivolous. And because, as the guard says, it seems like here's a young man who could easily turn his talents and passion to a career with far less effort than it takes to survive a long stint up the river. Reading it, you want him so badly to get himself together, maybe get an internship with a fashion P.R. house. But it's obvious that he's in the grip of something so much bigger than himself, where the only concrete thing is - well, things. And who can wonder at someone wanting to forcibly grasp stability?
[Via Jezebel] [Complete New York Magazine Article]
