Ryan* is 25 and he’s a shoplifter. He’s good at it too – about four times a week, he makes “no small money” by stealing and reselling goods from large department stores where security is limited. He’s strategic: he makes sure he’s clean and tidy, and keeps aware of CCTV. He usually steals just one or two high-value items to limit the risk of detection – designer garments or a small speaker, which he slips into a bag as he walks around the shop, before browsing a little longer and exiting.

His actions are part of recent record highs in shoplifting offences. From March 2024 to March 2025, there were 530,643 offences recorded in England and Wales. This is a 20% rise on the previous year and the highest figure since current police recording practices began in 2003. There has been ample media coverage of this spike, helped by the recent scandal of a Waitrose worker being sacked after confronting a man stealing Easter eggs. Retail workers are suffering on the frontline; in its 2026 crime survey, the British Retail Consortium found that theft was “a major trigger for violence and abuse of staff”, leading the trade union for retail workers to warn that “shoplifting is not a victimless crime”. Meanwhile, the claim that Britain’s shoplifting “epidemic” symbolises a wider descent into “lawlessness” has become a familiar one in the media.

Ryan is one of several habitual shoplifters I got to know while researching how people who are chronically homeless (in and out of homelessness over long periods of their lives) make an income. There was also Paul, 38, who often steals alcohol, meat or cheese but remains open to unexpected opportunities as they come along: he came to our interview zinging with excitement at having spotted a hairdressing salon with the door open and no staff visible. “Two hairdressing chairs, pure sitting there … I could sell them,” he said. Patrick, 31, steals alcohol and sometimes drinks it himself, but he also has an ongoing arrangement with various corner shops and pubs in his neighbourhood, selling them litre bottles from chain supermarkets at half the retail price.

These are people who might be called career shoplifters. They are not the obviously sympathetic characters that liberals and progressives like to highlight when talking about the rise in shoplifting. Zack Polanski, leader of the Green party, recently offered such a view in a TV debate, foregrounding struggling parents stealing nappies and food; several reports have focused on an increase in elderly shoplifters “who just can’t afford to buy food”. But the three people I’ve described were not stealing to eat or to feed their children; they were stealing to resell and make cash for themselves, largely to fund drug and alcohol dependencies.

We don’t have national data to tell us what proportion of shoplifters are stealing for which reasons, but my experience and research in this sector suggests that stealing to resell is a common income strategy – so common that academics recognise it frequently in papers on homelessness and the “street economy” even without those overarching statistics.

These career shoplifters are easily, if lazily, assumed to be simply bad people, with no mitigating circumstances. But if we want to understand the shoplifting phenomenon in Britain, we need to understand the lives of people such as Ryan, Paul and Patrick, rather than just those whose motivations might more easily attract public sympathy.

By dividing people who steal into the categories of “justified” (or at least, excusable) and “wrong’uns”, we are falling into a long-recognised criminological fallacy known as the “victim/offender binary”. We tend to view people as one or the other and struggle to understand that, empirically, people are more likely to be both – those who commit crimes are much more likely to be victims too. The binary is usually applied to interpersonal harm, eg assault and robbery, but we can also think about the harms caused by institutions and society in general. When we do this, Ryan and co’s behaviour starts to make sense and maybe even provoke sympathy.

All of the prolific thieves I met began life in violent family homes, in one case involving the murder of a parent. Their childhoods were characterised by fear, flux and parental substance abuse. Most went into what we misleadingly call the “care” system as young children, although Paul began sofa surfing aged 11, somehow avoiding social services and lacking a stable home until his late teens. Sexual and physical abuse are repeated themes, as is a lack of formal education. They have little, and often no, experience of conventional work. This is not because none of them wanted to work in normal ways; it is because they are thoroughly excluded from that option thanks to their undereducation, the childhood trauma they carry and their understandable self-medication with drugs and alcohol.

Of course, their immensely disadvantaged histories do not oblige them to become shoplifters. There are plenty of people with similar life experiences who do not steal. But we know that these experiences – growing up in care, having parents addicted to substances, being abused and so on – markedly raise the probability that, as adults, they will offend. Simply being a care leaver makes people 10 times more likely to end up in prison, let alone with other compounding harms. Articulating these factors is not making excuses; it is being honest about the circumstances that make it more likely people will commit crimes without sufficient support. The chances of these career shoplifters leading law-abiding lives were low from day one.

The government’s answer to this problem is to blame an apparent sense of impunity among shoplifters. Consequently, it is introducing new measures in the crime and policing bill to repeal a previous law that it alleges is perceived by would-be thieves to grant immunity to people stealing goods worth less than £200. After the bill is passed, prosecuted retail thefts of any value will be charged as “general theft”, which has a maximum custodial sentence of seven years.

This is unlikely to succeed. Ignoring the fact that shoplifting has been a crime in England since 1699, it assumes that increasing the risk of jail time will deter people from shoplifting. The criminologists Lynne M Vieraitis and Rashaan A DeShay have found that thieves assess the costs and benefits of stealing in advance and raising the perceived costs – capture, jail time – will work in some cases for some people. But they have also shown that this effect is limited because many thieves believe they are more skilled than the security measures in place, some are willing to do jail time and those with addictions are generally undeterred by heightened risks.

Effective crime prevention relies on understanding the causes of crime. We must confront the fact that there are many people stealing for more reasons than just poverty; addressing the cost of living is an incomplete solution. It’s understandable why progressive voices avoid such assertions – talking about experiences such as Ryan’s risks handing ammunition to those who believe in nothing but a heavy-handed, law-and-order solution to rising crime. But it’s also obvious to most people that many shoplifters are not mums nicking nappies. If we could bring ourselves to be less squeamish about this reality, we might be able to find sympathy and solutions that finally include people such as Ryan.

*Names have been changed

• Emily Kenway is a social policy doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh and author of Who Cares: the Hidden Crisis of Caregiving and How We Solve It