Cindy Lange-Kubick: Support group addresses a very real personal problem

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Sitting outside a courtroom last Friday morning — waiting to be sentenced on a shoplifting charge — Elizabeth Blank pointed to her hands.

“I’ve thought about cutting them off if it would help.”

Sunday, I wrote a column about the 75-year-old Lincoln woman whose police record is longer than the greediest child’s Christmas list.

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The headline told the story: “59 years of stealing … and still not cured.”

Elizabeth and her therapists believe she has a mental disorder called kleptomania.

The judge believed otherwise and sentenced her to 90 days.

While Elizabeth sits in jail for swiping wood chisels from Menards, the support group she attended has struggled.

Elizabeth had been attending CASA: Cleptomaniacs and Shoplifters Anonymous meetings since the group started last year.

(Terry Shulman, author of “Shoplifting Addiction and Recovery” and the nationwide support group’s founder, wanted the acronym to have a safe, homey feel, thus the intentional misspelling of kleptomania.)

The woman who got the Lincoln group going was a grandmother from Waverly who had been in jail for shoplifting.

She put up fliers. Elizabeth heard about it and called her.

The first four weeks, it was just the two of them.

Then two older women drove down from Omaha. A man called for more information but didn’t show up.

I imagine it’s difficult getting people to show up in a public place and sit down and say they shoplift, even if the others in the room have done it, too.

The thing is this: Plenty of people steal, or have stolen.

Or they shop compulsively and can’t pay their bills.

Or they pocket office supplies and don’t think anything of it.

Here are some figures from the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention:

* 25 million Americans have shoplifted, or about one in 11.

* 75 percent of shoplifters are adults.

* Only a small percentage are “professional” shoplifters who steal to pad their wallets or feed drug habits.

* Shoplifters say they are only caught an average of once every 49 times.

* Compulsive shoplifters describe a high from getting away with stealing that becomes more important than the item they’ve stolen.

* More than 70 percent do not plan to steal when they go shopping.

* Compulsive shoppers buy to relieve anxiety or fill an inner void.

* Employee theft accounts for $100 billion in losses for companies every year.

Probably the most important thing to know about CASA is its goal:

“To provide a safe, confidential and non-judgmental space for compassion, understanding and recovery from ‘addictive-compulsive’ dishonest behavior, primarily shoplifting, fraud, kleptomania and embezzlement.”

You can count me in the number of shoplifters who stole as an adolescent.

And we’d need more space than we have here to dissect the reasons.

Maybe that gives me shoplifter empathy. Did I know it was wrong? Yes. Did that stop me? No.

Would I shoplift now? Never.

Do I think addiction is too strong a word for shoppers who rack up credit card bills for things they don’t need? Or steal because they like the feeling of getting away with something?

I’m not sure.

I do know that after Elizabeth’s story ran Sunday, people started telling me stories about the respectable lady from their hometown who couldn’t go shopping without pocketing a scarf or a piece of jewelry and the sheriff’s wife who couldn’t stop stealing — despite being the sheriff’s wife.

I saw the look in Elizabeth’s eyes when she talked about cutting off her hands.

Maybe she was just playing me for a fool, a sympathetic reporter who might keep her from being locked up one more time.

Or maybe not.

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.