A Shoplifting Solution Billed As Enlightened Was Ruled To Be “Textbook Extortion”
Big retailers, like Walmart, have a massive shoplifting problem. The company loses about $3 billion, or about 1% of its annual sales, every year to theft. Police across the country are overwhelmed by the volume of daily phone calls from local Walmart stores. In 2016, the retailer came up with a solution. It hired two companies that would target the problem using education programs billed as “restorative justice,” a philosophy that addresses the community harm in a given crime, and avoids being unnecessarily punitive. The practices of one of these providers, the Corrective Education Company (CEC), have raised questions in recent years. In August, a California state court ruled in a lawsuit that its operations are “textbook extortion.” The case also suggests that CEC’s operations have little to do with the concept and intentions of restorative justice, an expert says. Read more at Quartz.
