No.
No theft (unless you count eating at a grocery store pre-paying, and I haven’t done that since I was nine), and no deliberate destruction of property (I’ve knocked things over, but never with intent, and I have never caused any serious damage).
No.
However, when I was eightteen my and my then BF stayed over with some friends, all in the 18-21 age age range. When I had gone to bed, the rest of them got high on weed and dared my BF to go out with them and rob a store. Well, it was more like looting; in a rather wild New Years Eve the night before someone else had accidentally broken the shop window, and as there was no alarm, they argued that the stuff in the shop window was “there to be taken”. It was a shop in household appliances.
My BF at the time was a stupid git, and very sensitive to peer pressure, so he went with them, stole a mini-washing machine he didn’t even need :rolleyes: and got busted by the police.
However, I used to have a job (takin inventory of vegatation and wildlife) for which I sometimes used to need to trespass on peoples property. Not gardens or yards, just peoples’ land that was in use as meadow or woodland, and where it wasn’t clear at first glance who the owner was. I have confronted angry owners once or twice. I guess in Texas they would have shot me first and asked what I was doing there later.
No.
I jumped a subway turnstile one time in high school, and I don’t regret it. Otherwise no.
However, I’ve known a handful of peers who would do the sorts of thing referred to in the OP (petty theft, trespassing for thrills). They maybe tended not to be my idea of good company, but they weren’t sociopaths, and they had friends and family that loved them. If their youthful stupidity had gotten them killed it would have been a tragedy, not justice.
Yes. All of it youthful mischief. And given the disparity between the percentage of my friends whom I know also participated in minor indiscretions, and the number of “yes” responses in this thread, I expect one or more of the following applies:
[ul]
[li]the respondents in this thread are (probably unintentionally) selectively remembering, or[/li][li]there’s a selection bias, and proportionally, more of those who would have to answer yes are declining to participate, or[/li][li]SDMB readers are a bunch of goody two-shoes.[/li][/ul]
Not really. I stole something accidentally as a kid once, but that’s about it. I dunno, I simply didn’t ever feel it was an option to steal or otherwise break the law. What would I have stolen? I was always into computers, so if I were to ever steal something it would have been on the internet.
Well I guess I broke the law too. I made fake IDs for myself and a few friends when I was a kid, and I also bought tobacco and alcohol underage. I went to a boarding school for gifted kids in highschool, and almost got kicked out because my roommate bought a bottle of everclear and decided to throw a party. Of course I participated because I wanted to be cool. When they went through our rooms the next day they found tobacco products, fake IDs in varying stages of construction, and alcohol.
But stealing? I’ve never wanted to break laws that hurt anyone else. I’d rather have done without.
I shot Kennedy.
Well, not really, other than some minor traffic violations (and you know here it is inevitable) there’s nothing.
Yes.
Yep.
Get to stop admitting to it on background checks in a couple of years here.
My late teens and early twenties were a time of dumb.
Yes. Criminals, with or without the ‘ex’ prefix, are human too, you know?
Where I live in Dubai, no bridges have any graffiti, but in Europe and the US it is all over the place. SE Asia doesn’t have much either.
Yes, mostly stealing tacky lawn ornaments. In fact, I have an amusing story.
There was this pig, life sized and several hundred pounds, in the yard of a friend’s neighbor. Said neighbor was a dick, and my friend had tried to steal it. It was too heavy, so all he could do was push it over and leave a note that said “Your pig is dead.” One night, several friends and I decided we had enough people to actually steal the pig, so we did. Then, not knowing what to do with it, we left it at my friend Nick’s house. His mother, not wanting it, gave it to her friend who put it out by her pool.
Fast forward 5 years. This woman got the screen around her pool replaced, and the company took a picture to use for an ad. The original owner of the pig saw the ad, then harassed both the company and the police until she found out where her pig was and was able to get it back.
That’s crazy.
That’s hilarious!
I’ve never done anything myself. I think. I have aided and abetted friends in acts of mild vandalism, however (e.g., splattering guacamole on a car taking up two parking spaces).
Your friends aren’t representative any more than mine. People tend to gravitate towards like-minded people or, due to peer pressure, to behave in the same way their friends do. I long ago noticed that people have vastly different perceptions of what an usual behaviour for a teenager is, mostly based on their own experience.
Some sub-groups will try to get in the pants of any female they can, while others will expect (relatively) long-lived romantic relationships, some will spend most or their time playing and discussing video games, while others’ main goal will be to get drunk enough to pass out at least once a week, some will attend political protests while others will go clubbing and partying every chance they get, some will get involved in all sort of mischiefs while others wouldn’t ever dare to steal a chocolate bar, etc…
But a common feature is that most assume that all other teenagers think, act and behave in the same way they and their friends do (or used to do), except maybe for a handful of despicable weirdos they have heard about (despicable because they cause mischief or because they don’t, because they get drunk all the time or because they never get laid, doesn’t matter).
Not to say that there isn’t any self-selection bias. But your own experience probably isn’t any more representative than the experience of other posters.
For the record, I was a law-abiding teenager (apart from drug consumption), and wouldn’t have stolen or destroyed any property, nor did I know any peer who was doing such things.
Just some trespassing for a few months during the year after I graduated from college, which was for a specific reason: I was taking a couple of photography classes and for one of them worked on a project that involved taking railway-related pictures. I did a fair amount of unauthorized creeping around on railroad property, mostly in the Washington, D.C., area and in Pennsylvania. It was good fun climbing up signal bridges, tramping around the Horseshoe Curve on foot and such, not that I’m recommending it to others. Never damaged anything and took only photographs.
This is the only thing that remotely counts:
When I was 7, a 12 year old told me to throw a brick through the window of a schoolhouse. I did. We got caught. The police came. They gave me the ‘‘don’t jump off any bridges’’ lecture.
Thus began (and ended) my life of crime.
I shoplifted as a teen, on a dare. Swiped a tube of tanning cream from a drugstore in another town. My stomach was in knots, and I never did it again.
Oh, and a couple of times we went through cars parked at a supper club, looking for booze and cigarettes.
Ah, but just this week, I borrowed some books from the school building where my daughter works. There was a pile of books in the hallway. (School’s not in session until September.) Nobody was around to ask so we don’t know if they’re being dumped or what. We took several of them but we’ll read them and put them back. But it feels wrong, like the Library Policeman will be at the door some night.
Oh, I definitely agree. I didn’t mean to claim that my experience was any sort of objective proof of the state of things. But it does color my own opinions, and this is IMHO, after all.
However, let me relate a tale: When I was much younger, my best friend was getting married. I was his best man, and I bore him no malice whatsoever. After the ceremony, we engaged in the traditional defacement of the groom’s car; however, we went a bit overboard, and the car was inadvertently damaged as a result.
I would count this incident under the terms of the OP. I definitely damaged the property of another. But this is the sort of thing that I suspect others are casually dismissing.
After closing night, I stole a large prop from a high school show in which I had performed. No one would have noticed, either, had not my accomplice bragged about it to someone who was guaranteed to make it a public issue. Several years and much drama later, I snuck it back onto the premises with a more discreet accomplice.
The very night of the heist, some friends and I were wandering the beach after sunset despite the posted signage. When a police cruiser approached, we decided to sit very still and maybe he wouldn’t notice us. The plan might have worked, except that we’d cleverly left the car in plain sight in the parking lot. (Curses!)
The cop looked us over to make sure we were sober and inspected the trunk to make sure we didn’t have booze. “No, officer, that’s my croquet set. See?”
We were sent on our way with an admonishment not to be on the beach after dark.