“I had never broken the law before”
Linda Morrison* had been working for a major department store just short of seven years when she did something she’d never done before: During her night shift, she went to the women’s clothing department, picked up a pretty blouse, and put it in her car without paying for it.
“It was so stupid,” says Morrison. “I had never broken the law before.” She says a couple of hours before the incident, she’d actually helped to catch a man who had shoplifted a vacuum cleaner, and so knew about the security cameras.
Indeed, a surveillance camera caught everything on tape, and management confronted her when the store closed. She was immediately fired from her job and charged with theft. “They called the police, and they came and took a statement,” she remembers. “When I was escorted back to my car, my husband and son were there waiting. Seeing the look on their faces… Talk about dying a million times. My son was looking at me like I was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He kept asking me why I did it.”
Questioning herself
Why had she done it? It was a question Morrison couldn’t answer. All she knew was that the past few years of her life had been very difficult. Did the answer lie there? “I had gone through two years of seeing my mom die of lung cancer. It was very slow and very painful,” Morrison says now. Additionally, she had been juggling her roles as a mother, wife and caregiver to her mom while working full-time.
After her mother’s death, Morrison took only three days off before going back to work. She struggled on for the next year, trying to maintain a normal life. In retrospect, she thinks she didn’t give herself enough time to grieve, and when new challenges came, she was overwhelmed. “The first anniversary of my mom’s death had just passed. Her birthday was coming up the next week and she was going to be 80. My son was off to university. It was just everything at once.” The result? She stole a blouse she didn’t need.
Morrison isn’t alone. On almost any given day in any criminal court, among gang members and contract murderers, you’ll find nicely dressed middle-aged women charged with theft under $5,000. In fact, when I was practising criminal law and a woman over 40 booked an appointment regarding a criminal charge, I knew it would be one of two things: impaired driving or shoplifting.
