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Afterword: The lie that told the truth? Reviewing Shirley Pitts' shoplifting scripts and criminal masquerade as 'creative practice'

This new, 12,000-word cross-disciplinary afterword was written for the reissue of Gamman’s 1997 biography of shoplifter Shirley Pitts. It explores images of female deviance and ‘crime scripts’. These are compared with Akrich’s (1992) and Latour’s (1992) accounts of ‘design scripts’ to identify how inadequate attention to crime prevention in retail spaces enabled Pitts to avoid detection. By extending Rivière’s (1929) and Kaplan’s (1991) accounts of the ‘masquerade’ as key to crime success, Gamman argues that Pitts’s manipulation of her visual identity in her shoplifting activities was a form of ‘criminal masquerade’.

The afterword gives an insight into how Gamman’s study of Pitts informed the abuser/misuser design research approach which characterised the model innovated by the Design Against Crime Research Centre of which Gamman was founding director. The material informed an invited keynote lecture for the Designing Out Crime Centre (Sydney, 2012) and a forthcoming paper on anti-shoplifting strategies (Palgrave).