So You've Been Publicly Shamed (22 page)

“They thought these things would be how to get them to obey,” Gilligan told me. “But it did the exact opposite. It stimulated violence.”

“Literally, every killer told you this?” I asked. “That the feeling of shame was what led them to do it?”

“It amazed me how universal it was,” Gilligan replied. “Over decades.”

“What about that pimp from Boston?” I said. “What was his story?”

“His mother had thought he was possessed by the devil,” Gilligan said, “so she did voodoo ceremonies and exorcisms in this totally black basement and he was scared to death. He'd shit his pants. He certainly was not loved in any normal sense. His mother had given him this negative identity—that Satan was inside him—so he behaved accordingly.” Gilligan paused. “It took some of them a while to confess it to me. It's shameful to have to admit you feel ashamed. By the way, we're saying the word
feeling
. The
feeling
of shame. I think
feeling
is the wrong word.”

It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a “feeling,” for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness. [In Dante's
Inferno
] the lowest circle of hell was a region not of flames, but of ice—absolute coldness.

—J
AMES
G
ILLIGAN
,
Violence: R
eflections on Our Dead
liest Epidemic

“And finally it struck me,” Gilligan said to me. “Our language tells us this. One of the words we use for overwhelming shame is
mortification
. ‘I'm mortified.'”

•  •  •

T
heir bodies are empty or filled with straw, not flesh and blood . . . Instead of having veins and nerves they have ropes or cords.

As Gilligan had said this to me, I remembered a moment from Jonah Lehrer's annihilation. It was when he was standing in front of that giant-screen Twitter feed trying to apologize. Jonah is the sort of person who finds displays of emotion extremely embarrassing, and he then looked deeply uncomfortable.

“I hope that when I tell my young daughter the same story I've just told you,” he was saying, “I will be a better person . . .”

“He is tainted as a writer forever,”
replied the tweets.
“He has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame.” “Jonah Lehrer is a friggin' sociopath.”

—

Later, when Jonah and I talked about that moment, he told me he had to “turn off some emotional switch in me. I think I had to shut down.”

Jonah had a house in the Hollywood Hills and a wife who loved him. He had enough self-esteem to get him through. But I think that in front of the giant Twitter screen he felt for an instant that same deadness that Gilligan's prisoners had described. I have felt it too. I know exactly what Jonah and Gilligan meant when they talked about shutting down—that moment pain turns to numbness.

•  •  •

J
ames Gilligan has led a distinguished life. President Clinton and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed him to sit on advisory committees on the causes of violence. Martin Scorsese based Ben Kingsley's character in
Shutter Island
on him. But for all his accolades, I left Gilligan's apartment thinking that he hadn't considered his life's work a success. There was a time when he might have totally changed the way the United States treated its transgressors. But it didn't happen.

This is the reason why: Throughout the 1980s, Gilligan ran experimental therapeutic communities inside Massachusetts's prisons. They weren't especially radical. They were just about “treating the prisoners with respect,” Gilligan told me, “giving people a chance to express their grievances and hopes and wishes and fears.” The point was to create an ambience that eradicated shame entirely. “We had one psychiatrist who referred to the inmates as scum. I told him I never wanted to see his face again. It was not only antitherapeutic for the patients, it was dangerous for us.” At first, the prison officers had been suspicious, “but eventually some of them began to envy the prisoners,” Gilligan said. “Many of them also needed some psychiatric help. These were poorly paid guys, poorly educated. We arranged to get some of them into psychiatric treatment. So they became less insulting and domineering. And violence dropped astoundingly.”

Even apparently hopeless cases were transformed, Gilligan said. Even that pimp from Boston. “After he joined our program, he discovered a profoundly retarded eighteen-year-old young man. The boy could hardly tie his shoelaces. So he took care of him. He started protecting him. He'd take him to and from the dining hall. He made sure other inmates didn't harm him. I was, ‘Thank God. This could be this guy's road back to humanity.' I told the staff, ‘Leave this alone.' Their relationship built and matured. And he has a life now. He has not harmed a hair on anybody's head in twenty-five years. He acts like a normal human being. He's not going anywhere. He's not normal enough to ever go back to the community. But he wouldn't want to. He knows he couldn't make it. He doesn't have the psychological wherewithal, the self-control. But he has reclaimed a level of humanity that I never thought was possible. He works in the prison mental hospital. He's useful to other people. And when I go back to visit, he smiles and says, ‘Hello, Dr. Gilligan. How are you?'” Gilligan paused. “I could tell you a hundred stories like that. We'd had men who had blinded themselves by banging their heads against the wall.”

—

In 1991, Gilligan began co-opting Harvard lecturers to donate their time to teach classes inside his prisons. What could be more deshaming than an educational program? His plan coincided with the election of a new governor, William Weld. Weld was asked about Gilligan's initiative in one of his first press conferences. “He said, ‘We have to stop this idea of giving free college education to inmates,'” Gilligan told me, “‘otherwise people who are too poor to go to college are going to start committing crimes so they can get sent to prison for a free education.'”

And so that was the end of the education program.

“He literally decimated it,” Gilligan said. “He stripped it. I didn't want to preside over a sham.” And so Gilligan quit.

As the years passed, he became for prison reformers a figure of nostalgia. Only a handful of therapeutic communities inspired by his Massachusetts ones exist in American prisons today. But, as it happens, one of them is situated on the top floor of the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, New Jersey. And it is being quietly run by the former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey.

•  •  •

T
he nontherapeutic lower floors of the Hudson County Correctional Center are drab and brown—like the ugly parts of a municipal leisure complex, a long corridor from a changing room to a swimming pool that will never be there. Down here is where New Jersey keeps its suspected immigration offenders. In November 2012 it was declared one of the ten worst immigration detention facilities in America, according to a Detention Watch Network report. Some of the guards down here reportedly called the detainees “animals,” and laughed at them, and subjected them to unnecessary strip searches. The report added: “Many immigrants also noted that corrections officers appeared to bring their personal problems to work, taking their frustration and anger out on them.”

—

“EVERY DAY IS A BLESSED DAY!” Jim hollered at a suspected immigration offender who was mopping the floor. The man looked startled. He smiled uneasily.

We kept walking—past inmates just sitting there, looking at walls. “Normal prison is punishment in the worst sense,” Jim told me. “It's like a soul-bleeding. Day in, day out, people find themselves doing virtually nothing in a very negative environment.”

I thought of Lindsey Stone, just sitting at her kitchen table for almost a year, staring at the online shamings of people just like her.

“People move away from themselves,” Jim said. “Inmates tell me time and again that they feel themselves shutting down, building a wall.”

Jim and I walked into an elevator. An inmate was already in there. Everyone was quiet.

“Every day is a blessed day,” said Jim.

More silence.

“Watch your character! It becomes your destiny!” said Jim.

We reached the top floor. The doors opened.

“You go first,” said Jim.

“Oh, no, please, you,” said the inmate.

“No, you,” said Jim.

“Oh, no, you,” said the inmate.

We all stood there. The inmate went first. Jim gave me a happy smile.

The first time I'd met Jim—when he'd yelled “STUDY HARD AT MATH!” at a startled stranger child—I'd found him a bit nuts. But somewhere along the line he'd become heroic to me. I'd been thinking about a message that had appeared on the giant Twitter feed behind Jonah's head:
“He
is tainted as a writer forever.”
And a tweet directed at Justine Sacco:
“Your tweet lives on forever.”
The word
forever
had been coming up a lot during my two years among the publicly shamed. Jonah and Justine and people like them were being told, “No. There is no door. There is no way back in. We don't offer any forgiveness.” But we know that people are complicated and have a mixture of flaws and talents and sins. So why do we pretend that we don't?

Amid all the agony, Jim McGreevey was trying an extraordinary thing.

—

In front of us was a giant locked dormitory room. Inside were forty women. This was Jim's therapeutic unit. We waited for someone to let us in. It wasn't like downstairs, Jim said; his women were “up at eight-thirty a.m. They all have chores. Everybody works. They're all assigned physical tasks. Then there are workshops—on sex abuse, domestic violence, anger management—then lunch, then in the afternoon they focus in on job training, housing. There are books. There's cake. There's the library. Then the mothers can read bedtime nursery rhymes to their children over Skype.”

There were glimpses of a summer day through the windows, and as a corrections officer let us in, she said that tensions were high because warm days are when a person really feels incarcerated.

—

Jim gathered the women into a circle for a group meeting. I wasn't allowed to record it and so I managed only to scribble down fragments of conversations like “I come from a small town so everyone knows where I am and that tears me up inside . . .” and “most people know why
Raquel
is in here . . .”

At that, a few women glanced over at the woman I took to be Raquel. Their looks seemed wary and deferential. Pretty much every woman here was in for drugs or prostitution. But the comment and the glances made me think that with Raquel it was something else.

Raquel's eyes darted around the room. She fidgeted a lot. The other women were stiller. I wondered what Raquel had done, but I didn't know the etiquette of how to ask. Then, as soon as the meeting broke up, Raquel immediately dashed across the room to me and told me everything. I somehow managed to get it all down—taking notes frantically like a secretary in
Mad Men
.

—

“I was born in Puerto Rico,” she said. “I was sexually abused from the age of four. When I was six, we moved to New Jersey. Every memory I have of growing up is a memory of being punched in the face and told I was worthless. When I was fifteen, my brother broke my nose. I ended up covered in blood. When I was sixteen, I had my first boyfriend. Three months later I was married. I started smoking pot, drinking. I cheated on my husband. I left him. Eighteen, nineteen was a big blur. I tried heroin. Thank God I don't have an addictive personality. I drank like a fish. We'd go to bars, wait for people to come out, take their money, and make fun of how they screamed for their moms. Suddenly, holy shit, I'm pregnant. I'm pregnant with the only thing that's ever going to love me. My son was born January 25, 1996. I went to business school, dropped out. I had a daughter. We moved to Florida. In Florida we'd have water fights, movie nights. I'd buy all their favorite food and lay it all out on the bed and we'd pile in and watch movies until we all passed out. We played baseball in the rain. My son loves comedy, drama, he sings. He won a talent show when he was fourteen. I would make him do his homework over and over. I used to make him do five-page reports, read encyclopedias. I shoved him out of the bed when he was fourteen and slapped him. A girl had texted him, ‘Are you a virgin?' I was ballistic. I slapped the shit out of him. It left nail marks.”

—

Ten months ago Raquel had sent her children to stay with their father in Florida for a vacation. As she watched them walk down the tunnel toward the plane, her son suddenly turned and called back at her, “How much do you want to bet I don't come back?” Then he said, “Just kidding.”

Raquel yelled back at him, “How much do you want to bet you don't get on that plane?”

Her son walked on for a few more steps. Then he called back, “We should make that bet.”

“And that was the last thing he ever said to me,” Raquel said.

—

That Friday the Department of Children and Families turned up at Raquel's house. Her son was accusing her of child abuse.

“He used to ask me if he could stay out until nine p.m,” Raquel said. “I'd say no. He'd ask why not. I'd say, ‘There are people out there that can hurt you.' But I was hurting him more than anyone. Thank God they got away from me when they did. He's safe. He's getting the chance to be a teenager. He's a very angry boy because I made him that way. My daughter is very shy, withdrawn, because I made her that way. I just pray they'll be normal.”