15 years old, came across a cheque book sitting in a RR mail box of someone who was away on vacation. Wrote out four cheques, went to down town St Catharines , Ontario, on a Saturday when banks were closed and purchased a coat, shoes, and pants and change(cash). Two stores bit, one made me sweat for 15 minutes phoning for confirmation which I knew wasn’t forthcoming. Two stores declined my cheques. I never returned to that part of St Catharines again.
You might say I was desparate. I needed the cash to make up a shortfall due to my newspaper route manager at the end of the month.
I had told myself this is my last chance for crime as I was about to turn 16.
I stole and vandalized lots of stuff as a minor (very deliberately), and I’ve had public sex as an adult. I have always trespassed a lot and continue to do so. I only got arrested once, when I was a teenager, for trespassing and vandalizing. I also drank alcohol and used cigarettes when underage and smoked a lot of pot for a little while there (never bought pot, sold it, or carried it on my person though). I’ve carried alcohol on me and been publicly drunk when underage. Think that’s it.
I’m 25 now and I’m mostly on the straight and narrow, but that’s only because I’d rather not face consequences of being caught shoplifting, etc.
Minor stuff as a kid. Petty vandalism, pinching candy, etc.
As an adult…
Petty theft(Drunk. )
Not so petty theft(though only because I was owed a large sum of money by said person, still counts though. Also, drunk.)
Vandalism(Drunk Again)
Falsifying official documents(Violently hung over)
Drunk driving(heh…)
Statutory Rape(And again. Please note that it was just outside the legal bounds, not an extremely egregious case. Also, she was drunk, which brings me too…)
Contributing to the delinquency of a minor * many(Intending to get drunk)
Assault(You seeing a pattern here?)
And the one thing I ever got handcuffed for… Public Intox. My friends were inconsistent with their stories on what exactly I yelled at the police officer(who as I am led to understand, showed remarkable restraint), but all were in agreement that it was loud, highly offensive, and highly belligerent. Also that I would. Just. Not. Shut. Up.
No ticket, No jail. I was given a worse fate. They turned me over to Shore Patrol…
In hindsight, its a very good thing I stopped drinking so much and so often. Took a while to get it out of my system, but it eventually did.
I shudder to look back on all that and realize if I were actually caught for all of it, I’d still be in prison.
I ate a peanut without paying for it as a kid. I will watch copyrighted videos that are not taken down.
I also stole someone’s internet password once, when I lost my internet at school due to a misunderstanding. (I had downloaded some nudie pics, and then, the next week, they asked if I had downloaded porn. I said yes, not realizing they meant real porn, and that someone had been using my account.)
When I was a 14ish my friends and I used to sneak off to an abandoned movie theater to engage in various early adolescent rebelliousness: smoking, spray-painting, stashing shop-lifted stuff there, lighting fires and homemade explosives, etc. Anyhoo, on the last day of eighth-grade, we stole all the French textbooks from our French class, piled them in the center of the building and lit them of fire (French was not our favorite subject). We didn’t actually intend to burn down the building, but in retrospect, thats a pretty obvious consequence of an indoor bonfire.
So I put major crime, since burning down a building seems kinda major, though the two of us that were got caught only got sentenced to some fairly light community service, so whatever the actual charge was couldn’t have been that severe.
Other then that, just the usual drunken hijinks and teen mischief.
“During the following weeks, we didn’t carry the walls of his store outside because they wouldn’t go through the mall’s doors…” A colorful way of saying that they stole everything possible. They didn’t steal the actual walls because that, of course, was impossible!
I have pirated mp3s and videos extensively as a child and an adult, and though IMO they shouldn’t count for this poll, I checked the boxes. I haven’t committed any other “crime”.
I picked “I committed one or more felonies as an adult”, but that doesn’t really capture the actual nature of what were, essentially, resistance acts in a liberation struggle, and also that it started before I was an adult. Also, the laws are so very different now.
I may have committed a crime in a circumstance that, in the end, it didn’t matter one way or the other.
The morning of Sep 11, 2001 also happened to be Primary Day in New York. I had moved about a year earlier from one house to another in Brooklyn (about a five minute walk away). However, for whatever reason, I never changed my voter registration. Since I really wanted to vote in the primary, I went back to the polling place for my old address, cast my ballot for any races that I knew were the same in both places (such as the statewide Senatorial ballot that year) and left. So, that may have been illegal (or maybe not – I don’t know). Of course, the primary itself was canceled after the attack so my vote was rendered meaningless anyway.
The upshot of all of this is that voting in the wrong place probably saved my life.
I worked about a block and a half from the WTC at the time. Normally, I took the B/D train to the N/R and got out at the World Trade Center. Based on my usual timing, I would have gotten there right about when the second plane struck. In other words, I could have walked out of the subway stairs to find jet parts and fuel raining down on my head.
As it turns out, because I was at a different polling place, it was easier for me to take the F train to the A/C and get out at Fulton Street. The F/A combination takes a bit longer, and, as a result, I walked out of the Fulton St. Station (about two blocks away) about two minutes after the second plane struck.
Nothing violent, but back in the day, printing posters with slogans, putting out an anti-government newsletter, hosting a political meeting or sheltering wanted activists (all things I did) were enough to get you anything from a fine to months in prison for the former two, to several years for the latter two. Never mind the “Being a member of a banned organisation” thing, which if you were really unlucky, could just get you killed.
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