The 2020 Black Lives Matter summer uprisings spawned remarkable movements and counter-movements. Discussions of police defunding and abolition proliferated into the mainstream, and prosecutors sought the label of “progressive.” The backlash, however, soon arrived in force: Police budgets largely steadied themselves, reformist prosecutors faced growing hostility, and the politics around “crime” and “public safety” became familiar again. In the end, the criminal system appeared to emerge fundamentally unchanged.
Yet the criminal system was not only a target for reform, but also representative of a broader political-economic order whose cracks had become unmistakable. Indeed, the criminal system continues to serve as a site of contestation over how the economy should work, and for whom. While scholarship has focused on the critiques and demands of abolitionist and other left social movements to illustrate this point, in a forthcoming article, I look in the other ideological direction. I analyze how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s most powerful business lobby, has used the national moral panic around retail theft to defend a carceral status quo alongside its ideas about the economy. Racialized state violence and an anti-state vision of “American free enterprise” are bound together here in a project of mutual justification.
The Retail Theft “Crisis”
From the beginning, the panic over “retail theft” was marked by exaggeration and treated as a harbinger of wider social decay. One of the early stories to receive national attention came out of San Francisco, where Walgreens had decided to close five of its stores, citing a rise in “organized retail crime.” Though the story quickly proved unfounded, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was later recalled, in part because of his supposed mishandling of retail theft. In a similar sequence, the National Retail Federation put out an influential report on the issue, claiming a dramatic rise in organized shoplifting, which apparently accounted for half of all inventory losses across the industry. The powerful lobbying group would later retract these overstated figures, which experts estimate are closer to five percent. In fact, the Federation’s own recent analyses indicate that the industry’s average shrink, referring to inventory losses due to theft, fraud, error, or damage, has steadily hovered around 1.5% of sales since as far back as 2016.
None of this seemed to bother the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: In March 2022, the Chamber wrote to Congress, the National Governors Association, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and the National District Attorneys’ Association, demanding immediate action against the apparent crisis of retail theft. The Chamber emphasized that “innocent consumers, employees, local communities, and business owners and shareholders bear the costs of rising retail theft.” Soon after, the Chamber began coordinating with state and local chamber chapters to press the issue regionally. As part of a wider media strategy, the organization also launched a “Retail Crime Data Center.” According to the Chamber, the Center became “a widely cited resource with 1,000+ media mentions in 2023, highlighting the serious impact of criminal organizations on American business and society.”
If effectively fighting this phantom threat required producing legal change, then the Chamber succeeded. In an October 2023 report titled Crime Risk to Business, the Chamber celebrated the many ways it and its partners have shifted the criminal legal landscape. Since the Chamber wrote to officials in March 2022, at least 19 states have revised their laws to combat the specter of retail theft: Many such laws increase the penalties for theft, including by lowering felony thresholds. Other laws allow for aggregation of separate theft offenses. In Wyoming, five separate theft convictions now make a felony, and a law in New Mexico allows for the aggregation of separate theft offenses over a 90-day period.
The report, however, advocates well beyond the boundaries of retail theft, revealing the Chamber’s more general interest in strengthening criminal punishment. In particular, the report includes repeated criticism of insufficiently carceral prosecutors. By the time the report was published, this line of critique had been gaining momentum. In April of that year, the Chamber had organized an event in Washington, D.C., focused on “America’s Crime Wave.” There, a New York congressional representative, Virginia’s Attorney General, and the CEO of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce led a discussion around “how prosecutors not prosecuting harms businesses across the country.” Building on this argument, the October report concludes by stating that “[l]ocal prosecutors with lax policies on bail, charging, and release practices are worsening the crime problem.” To counteract this, “[s]tate and local officials need to hold such prosecutors accountable by aligning with the business community to advance legislation that helps reduce backlogs in cases.” Such legislation, the report posits, could include mechanisms that empower state officials to remove local prosecutors. As of the date of the report, at least 24 bills across 16 states had been introduced to address the Chamber’s idea of prosecutorial misconduct.
The report also calls for increased coordination between businesses and the official architects of crime policy. Chambers of commerce in Ohio and New Mexico recently spearheaded “anti-crime associations” made up of business owners and law enforcement leaders; elsewhere, jurisdictions have organized similar groups under the banner of “organized retail theft” taskforces. This enhanced coordination between capital and the criminal system has come not only at the frontend of criminal punishment, but also at the backend. For example, since 2022, the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce has led development of the state’s “Prison-to-Work Pipeline” program. And the recently formed Second Chance Business Coalition, whose partners include the Business Roundtable, provides a centralized hub to facilitate connections between businesses and reentry institutions. Strengthening these forms of coordination, one focused on punishment and the other on reentry, are complementary projects. Together, they help reproduce an employer-friendly balance of power in the workplace, something the Chamber is very much interested in.
Defending Free Enterprise
Founded in 1912, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the world’s largest business lobby. Beyond its lobbying, readers are most likely aware of the Chamber’s formidable litigation department, which regularly challenges laws that protect workers, consumers, and the environment against the excesses and imbalances of U.S. racial capitalism. Others steeped in agency rulemaking processes likely have come across the Chamber’s comment letters, which reliably oppose any meaningful market regulation.
As historian Kim Phillips-Fein notes, Chamber leadership began its most ambitious project in the 1970s: developing a “social movement for capitalism,” with the Chamber serving as the central organizational node. The movement involved building bridges across reactionary groups, channeling the backlash against social justice causes, such as the “civil rights, gay rights, feminist, and antiwar movements,” into support for the Chamber’s vision for American free enterprise. The bet was that promoting conservative cultural values would help produce a political climate favorable to business.
Defending criminal punishment and harnessing the lingering backlash against the 2020 racial justice uprisings is today’s iteration of this longstanding strategy. Suzanne Clark, the Chamber’s current CEO, made this clear enough in her 2023 State of American Business address. Clark concluded her speech by noting the need to “bolster America’s strength through the rule of law.” “[T]he scourge of crime sweeping America’s cities,” Clark continued, has left customers afraid to shop, businesses unable to stay open, and corporations unwilling to invest their capital. Under Clark’s view, public safety delivered through vigorous criminal law enforcement is a precondition to prosperity, itself resulting from the efforts “free enterprise.”
Beyond linking law enforcement and market-based prosperity, the Chamber has also used the retail theft panic to present self-serving explanations around the moment’s most pressing economic concerns. From the very beginning of its advocacy, continuing through to this year, the Chamber has blamed retail theft for rising consumer prices. This was an important argument to introduce in the discourse around inflation, as the idea of “greedflation” entered the mainstream and the notion of “sellers’ inflation” gained traction in academic and policy circles.
Through its attention to retail theft, the Chamber also offered a diagnosis of society’s broader social instability. Such instability didn’t have to do with financial and affordability crises, growing inequality, pandemic unpreparedness, or fossil capital. The disorder felt among business, consumers, workers, and entire communities could instead be traced to the national crisis of crime. The solution, naturally, was to ratchet up America’s already exceptional penal system.
