When I was about 12 a few friends and I had a 'shoplifting club'. We mostly stole little novelty toys in blister packs from the local drug store (more like a convenience store). One boy always pushed his luck by trying to steal something from the display just under the register. He was never caught. Two of the members of the club did get caught when they tried to steal a couple of gerbils from a pet store! In the end we returned almost all the merchandise we had stolen and were let off after advising the manager on how to rearrange his display items to reduce shoplifting. We were certainly lucky that nothing else happened to us. The only thing that I kept was a small penknife.

Many years later when my then girlfriend was a PhD student at Berkeley her advisor asked me if I might have a talk with her 13-year-old son who had recently been caught shoplifting. She was divorced and thought that he needed a man to speak to him about his transgression as he was in a real funk about it. I talked to the kid and his mother had made him feel like he was the only boy in the world who had ever done anything so heinous. I told him what we had done at about his age and advised him not to do it again but made it clear that for better or worse lots of tweens had engaged in similar behavior.

A few days later the mother said to me, "I don't know what you said to him, but he has certainly cheered up'.