John Rappaport on Retailers' Use of Private Companies to Punish Shoplifters
Privatized Justice: ‘Re-Educating’ the American Shoplifter
According to the draft of a working paper from the University of Chicago Law School, described as the first “scholarly treatment of the ‘retail justice system,’” it’s an example of “how private industry has penetrated new parts of the criminal process, extracting admissions of guilt and administering deterrent sanctions.”
The study’s author, John Rappaport, an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, says the CEC’s growing popularity among retailers underlines the inefficiencies of the current system at dealing with shoplifting, which cost U.S. stores as much as $18 billion last year.
Most retail outlets rarely detect shoplifters, and when they do, punishment is often uneven, he writes. Managers are left to make discretionary decisions about whether they should call law enforcement, or avoid the extra work involved on a crowded shopping day by simply kicking the offender out of the store.
Read more at The Crime Report