by Jon Ronson
This is the reason why. Throughout the 1980s Gilligan ran experimental therapeutic communities inside Massachusetts’ 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 anti-therapeutic 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 programme 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 to co-opt Harvard lecturers to donate their time for free to teach classes inside his prisons. What could be more de-shaming than an educational programme? 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 programme.
‘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 non-therapeutic 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 amongst 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?
Amidst 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. Unlike downstairs, Jim said, his women are ‘up at 8.30 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 - note-taking 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. 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, wa
it 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 25th January 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 favourite 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 encyclopaedias. 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 sent her children to stay with their father in Florida for a vacation. As she watched them walk down the tunnel towards 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 9 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.’
For the first few months of Raquel’s incarceration she was downstairs on a non-therapeutic floor.
‘What was that like?’ I asked her.
‘Downstairs is chaos,’ she replied. ‘It’s borderline barbaric. Downstairs girls get slapped with the food trays. Some girl will decide she doesn’t like you. She’ll pull you into a room and lock the door and you’ll fight and whoever comes out unbroken wins. Up here we eat coffee cake. We watch TV. We spread books across the table. It’s like we’re in a college cafeteria sipping our coffee. Sophisticated!’
Just then there was a commotion. A woman behind us had collapsed and was having a seizure. She was carried away on a stretcher.
‘Feel better!’ some of the other women shouted after her. ‘Last call for medications,’ an officer called out.
Jim and I left the prison and walked back towards his car.
‘How long do you think Raquel will stay in prison?’ I asked him.
‘We’ll know more in two weeks,’ he replied. ‘That’s when we’re due to hear from the prosecutor. My guess is a few more months.’
Jim said he’d pass on the news when he heard it. Then he drove me to the train station.
I didn’t hear from Jim two weeks later, so I emailed: ‘How did things go with Raquel?’
Jim emailed back. ‘She received difficult news yesterday. An eight-count indictment. She is in significant emotional pain.’
I telephoned him. ‘What are they charging her with?’ I asked.
‘Attempted murder in the first degree,’ Jim replied. He sounded shaken. ‘She threw a knife at her son. They’re going for a twenty-year jail sentence.’
*
Six months later. Three people sat together in the council chamber at Newark City Hall: me, Jim and Raquel.
Jim had intervened. The prosecutors were persuaded that Raquel was the victim of an ‘abuse cycle’. And so instead of twenty years she served four more months and then they let her go.
‘If shaming worked, if prison worked, then it would work,’ Jim said to me. ‘But it doesn’t work.’ He paused. ‘Look, some people need to go to prison forever. Some people are incapable … but most people …’
‘It’s disorienting,’ I said, ‘that the line between hell and redemption in the US justice system is so fine.’
‘It’s public defenders that are overwhelmed and prosecutors that are following guidelines,’ Jim said.
This has been a book about people who really didn’t do very much wrong. Justine and Lindsey, certainly, were destroyed for nothing more than telling bad jokes. And while we were busy steadfastly refusing them forgiveness, Jim was quietly arranging the salvation of someone who had committed a far more serious offence. It struck me that if de-shaming would work for a maelstrom like Raquel, if it would restore someone like her to health, we’d really need to think twice about raining down vengeance and anger as our default position.
It wasn’t freedom without boundaries for Raquel. She’d been banned from contacting her children for five years. Her son would be twenty-two then, her daughter seventeen, ‘so even when she’s seventeen any contact will have to be OK’d with their father,’ Raquel told me, ‘because my parental rights have been stripped’. But still, she gets updates. ‘My friends from Florida are still friends with them. My friend actually called me yesterday and said, “You will never guess who is Facebooking me right now.” I said, “Who?” She said, “Your daughter.” I said, “No way!” My daughter is sending her messages, and she’s sitting there reading them to me. So apparently my daughter has a little crush on someone. He’s got a cleft in his chin. He’s got sandy-brown hair …’
I told Raquel it was nice to see her in such a good mood. And that’s when she told me her news.
‘Yesterday, when group was over, Miss Blake called me into her office.’
Miss Blake was the manager of Raquel’s halfway house.
‘She said, “Raquel, I’ve seen how you carry yourself, how the guys listen to you. I want to offer you a job here. Can you get me your resume?”’
Raquel replied, ‘As luck would have it I have a resume right here.’
Then Raquel said, ‘Miss Blake, is this really happening?’
And Miss Blake nodded.
*
I got a call from Michael Fertik’s people. They were ready to start on Lindsey Stone.
14
CATS AND ICE CREAM AND MUSIC
‘Are there any hobbies you’re particularly passionate about right now? Marathons? Photography?’
Farukh Rashid in San Francisco was talking down a conference line to Lindsey Stone. I was listening in from my sofa in New York.
I’d met Farukh a few months earlier when Michael’s publicist, Leslie Hobbs, gave me a tour of the reputation. com offices - two open-plan floors with soundproofed booths for the sensitive calls to celebrity clients. She introduced me to Farukh and explained that he usually works on Michael’s VIP customers - the CEOs and celebrities.
‘It’s nice that you’re giving Lindsey the bespoke service,’ I said.
‘She needs it,’ Leslie replied.
She really did. Michael’s strategists had been researching Lindsey’s online life and had discovered literally nothing about her besides that Silence and Respect incident.
‘That five seconds of her life is her entire Internet presence?’ I said.
Farukh nodded. ‘And it’s not just this Lindsey Stone. Anyone that has that name has the same problem. There are sixty Lindsey Stones in the US. There’s a designer in Austin, Texas; a photographer; there’s even a gymnast; and they’re all being defined by that one photograph.’
‘I’m sorry to have given you such a tricky one,’ I said, feeling a little proud of myself.
‘Oh, no, we’re excited,’ Farukh replied. ‘It’s a challenging scenario but a great scenario. We’re going to introduce the Internet to the real Lindsey Stone.’
‘Are cats important to you?’ Farukh asked Lindsey now down the conference line.
‘Absolutely,’ said Lindsey.
I heard Faruk
h type the word ‘cats’ into his computer. Farukh was young and energetic and just as upbeat and buoyant and lacking in cynicism and malevolent irony as he was hoping to make Lindsey seem. His Twitter profile said he enjoys ‘biking, hiking, and family time’. His plan was to create Lindsey Stone Tumblrs and LinkedIn pages and WordPress blogs and Instagram accounts and YouTube accounts to overwhelm that terrible photograph, wash it away in a tidal wave of positivity, away to a place on Google where normal people don’t look - a place like page two of the search results. According to Google’s own research into our ‘eye movements’, 53 per cent of us don’t go beyond the first two search results, and 89 per cent of us don’t look down past the first page.
‘What the first page looks like,’ Michael’s strategist Jered Higgins told me during my tour of their offices, ‘determines what people think of you.’
As a writer and a journalist - as well as a father and human being - this struck me as a really horrifying way of knowing the world.
‘I’m passionate about music,’ Lindsey told Farukh. ‘I like Top 40 chart music.’
‘That’s really good,’ said Farukh. ‘Let’s work with that. Do you play an instrument?’
‘I used to,’ Lindsey said. ‘I was kind of self-taught. It’s just something I mess around with. It’s not anything I …’ Suddenly she trailed off. At first she’d sounded like she’d been enjoying the fun of it all, but now she seemed selfconscious, like the endeavour was giving her troubling existential thoughts - questions like ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What are we doing?’
‘I’m having a hard time with this,’ she said. ‘As a normal person I don’t really know how to … brand myself online. I’m trying to come up with things for you guys to write about. But it’s hard, you know?’
‘Piano? Guitar? Drums?’ said Farukh. ‘Or travel? Where do you go?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lindsey said. ‘I go to the cave. I go to the beach. I get ice cream.’
At Farukh’s request, Lindsey had been emailing him photographs that didn’t involve her inadvertently flipping off military cemeteries. She’d been providing biographical details too. Her favourite TV show was Parks and Recreation. Her employment history included five years at Walmart ‘which was kind of soul-suckingly awful’.
