Firm that teaches 'life skills' to suspected shoplifters extorts them, suit alleges
Source: LA times
The San Francisco city attorney filed suit Monday against a Utah-based company that asks suspected shoplifters to sign confessions and pay hundreds of dollars to take a six-hour “life skills” video course or risk prosecution, saying the firm’s practices amount to extortion and false imprisonment.
The suit was filed in San Francisco County Superior Court against Corrective Education Co., which goes by the name CEC and was founded in 2010 by two Harvard Business School graduates.
The company calls itself “the leading provider of restorative justice education,” and purports to give low-level, first-time shoplifters a valuable opportunity to learn how to make better choices, while saving them “a criminal record.”
Retailers who have contracted to use the program include Bloomingdale's, Walmart, Burlington Coat Factory, DSW Inc., and Goodwill Industries of Orange County, according to documents and interviews.
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The company’s “vision involves making threats and false and misleading statements to people detained by private security guards in the back room of a store to induce them to sign unlawful and unconscionable contracts confessing to crimes,” the lawsuit contends.
The suspected shoplifters then agree to pay “CEC hundreds of dollars for an ‘educational’ video program that operates without the knowledge or involvement of the criminal justice system, and that flouts many of the laws that regulate pretrial diversion programs as well as a host of other laws,” the lawsuit says.
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-shoplifting-suit-20151123-story.html
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