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There’s no judicial oversight, there are no constitutional protections, there’s no due process

Another lawyer, Steven Wasserman of the Legal Aid Society’s Criminal Practice Special Litigation Unit, said it sounded like CEC was “flirting with the crime of coercion in the second degree”—at least in New York State, where that crime is defined as compelling or inducing “a person to engage in conduct which the latter has a legal right to abstain from engaging in… by means of instilling in him or her a fear that, if the demand is not complied with,” he or she will be accused of a crime or face criminal charges. In other words, pressuring people into giving up their rights in exchange for $320.

CEC executives emphasized that not one of the 20,000 people who have gone through their program were coerced into doing so. “It’s all voluntary,” Huntsman told me. “If someone started to take the course and paid for it—if they change their mind and they want to get their day in court, we’ll refund their money and put the case back in the retailer’s hands. They’ve got multiple opportunities to step back from this.”

Huntsman added that when offenders are apprehended, they are shown a brief video about CEC before they’re sent home, which tells them that if they believe they are innocent, they should obtain legal counsel and fight whatever charges may come. But according to Caffaro, more than 90 percent of people who have been offered the course during CEC’s four years in business have elected to take it.

The core of the CEC course—which primarily lives online, but can also be taken on paper—was developed by Robert Setty, a clinical psychologist in Austin, Texas, and adapted by CEC for the purpose of rehabilitating shoplifters. The course takes a total of about six to eight hours to complete, and those who sign up are required to finish and pay within 90 days of their apprehension. If they don’t, their cases revert to the retailer’s loss-prevention department, which usually means the police are called, and formal charges ensue.