So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

  • • •

  A few weeks after Jim’s visit to the Bergen Record, the newspaper published a profile of the unexpected Israeli staff member, referring to Golan as a “sailor” (he had once been in the Israeli navy) and a “poet” (he’d written a collection of poems in high school). Jim feared they might be using code words, but he didn’t know for sure and he couldn’t talk to anyone about it. His staff was acting like nothing was different, but that didn’t mean nothing was different.

  “People don’t say things to governors that they don’t think governors want to hear,” he told me.

  —

  Jim distanced himself from Golan. He told him he needed to quit his job for the good of the administration. Golan was devastated. He had envisaged a great career in U.S. politics and now Jim was throwing him on the fire to save his own career.

  A few weeks later, a letter arrived for Jim. It was from Golan’s lawyer. Golan was threatening to sue Jim for sexual assault and harassment.

  “When I got that letter, I had this vision of my grandmother’s china cabinet,” Jim told me. “And all the china was just smashing.”

  —

  After three years in power, it was over for Jim. He called a press conference. “I am a gay American,” he announced.

  He confessed the affair, resigned the governorship, stepped off the stage, checked himself into the Meadows, an Arizona clinic, and was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder.

  • • •

  You met James Gilligan?” Jim said to me in the restaurant. “Oh, I love Gilligan. I love Gilligan.”

  In fact, I had met James Gilligan at the very beginning of my journey—a few days after Jonah Lehrer had made his disastrous apology speech at the Knight Foundation lunch. Gilligan is in late middle age now, with the worried face and wispy hair and wire-rimmed glasses of the East Coast psychiatrist he is. I sat with him in the communal courtyard of his apartment in New York City’s West Village. He’s about the world’s best-informed chronicler of what a shaming can do to our inner lives, which is why he’s so opposed to its renaissance on social media. I wanted to learn how he came to make it his life’s work.

  —

  Back in the 1970s, Gilligan told me, he was a young psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. His days were spent “treating middle-class neurotics like you and me.” He was completely uninterested in the strange epidemic that was occurring within Massachusetts’s prisons and mental hospitals “of suicides and homicides and riots and hostage taking and fire setting and everything you can imagine that was dangerous. Prisoners were getting killed, officers were getting killed, visitors were getting killed. It was completely out of control during the entire decade of the 1970s. There was a murder a month in one prison alone, and a suicide every six weeks.”

  Inmates were swallowing razor blades and blinding and castrating themselves and each other. A U.S. District Court judge, W. Arthur Garrity, ordered the Department of Corrections to make sense of the chaos by bringing in a team of investigative psychiatrists. Gilligan was invited to lead the group. He agreed, but he wasn’t enthusiastic. He assumed the perpetrators of the prison violence would be psychopaths.

  “I’d been taught that psychopaths had just been born that way,” he said, “and that they’d only want to manipulate you so you’d get them a reduced sentence.”

  He pictured them like they were another species. And that’s exactly how they seemed to him when he first went inside the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane.

  “One of the first men I met had been a pimp in a slum area of Boston,” Gilligan said. “He killed some of his girls, and he killed other people. He killed several people in the community before he was finally arrested. So they put him in the Charles Street jail to await trial. And he promptly killed one of the inmates there. So they said, ‘He’s too violent to await trial in the jail. We have to send him to Walpole’—the maximum-security prison. And he killed someone there. And that’s when I met him. He looked like a zombie. He was mute, rather paranoid, not overtly psychotic but literally abnormal. Everybody was scared to death of him. I thought, This guy’s untreatable. But we needed to keep people safe. So we put him in a locked dormitory building, and during the day, I told the staff, ‘Keep an invisible wall around him. Keep six feet away from him. Don’t crowd him. If you crowd him, you might get injured.’”

  And that’s how things remained for a while. But eventually the man—and other men like him—loosened up a little to Gilligan. And what they told him came as a great surprise to him.

  “The men would all say that they had died,” Gilligan said. “These were the most incorrigibly violent characters. They would all say that they themselves had died before they started killing other people. What they meant was that their personalities had died. They felt dead inside. They had no capacity for feelings. No emotional feelings. Or even physical feelings. So some would cut themselves. Or they would mutilate themselves in the most horrible ways. Not because they felt guilty—this wasn’t a penance for their sins—but because they wanted to see if they had feelings. They found their inner numbness more tormenting than even the physical pain would be.”

  Gilligan filled notepads with observations from his interviews with the men. He wrote, “Some have told me that they feel like robots or zombies, that their bodies are empty or filled with straw, not flesh and blood, that instead of having veins and nerves they have ropes or cords. One inmate told me he feels like ‘food that is decomposing.’ These men’s souls did not just die. They have dead souls because their souls were murdered. How did it happen? How were they murdered?”

  This was, Gilligan felt, the mystery he’d been invited inside Massachusetts’s prisons and mental hospitals to solve.

  And one day it hit him. “Universal among the violent criminals was the fact that they were keeping a secret,” Gilligan wrote. “A central secret. And that secret was that they felt ashamed—deeply ashamed, chronically ashamed, acutely ashamed.” It was shame, every time. “I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed. As children, these men were shot, axed, scalded, beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated, set on fire, thrown out of the window, raped, or prostituted by mothers who were their pimps. For others, words alone shamed and rejected, insulted and humiliated, dishonored and disgraced, tore down their self-esteem, and murdered their soul.” For each of them the shaming “occurred on a scale so extreme, so bizarre, and so frequent that one cannot fail to see that the men who occupy the extreme end of the continuum of violent behavior in adulthood occupied an equally extreme end of the continuum of violent child abuse earlier in life.”

  So they grew up and—“all violence being a person’s attempt to replace shame with self-esteem”—they murdered people. One inmate told him, “You wouldn’t believe how much respect you get when you have a gun pointed at some dude’s face.” Gilligan said, “For men who have lived for a lifetime on a diet of contempt and disdain, the temptation to gain instant respect in this way can be worth far more than the cost of going to prison or even of dying.”

  And after they were jailed, things only got worse. At Walpole—Massachusetts’s most riot-prone prison during the 1970s—officers intentionally flooded the cells and put insects in the prisoners’ food. They forced inmates to lie facedown before they were allowed meals. Sometimes officers would tell prisoners they had a visitor. Prisoners almost never had visitors, so this was exciting to hear. Then the officer would say that the prisoner didn’t really have a visitor and that he was just kidding. And so on.

  “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?”

&nb
sp; “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.

  —JAMES GILLIGAN, Violence: Reflections on Our Deadliest 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.’”

  • • •

  Their 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.

  • • •

  James 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.

  • • •

  The 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 . . .”