So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson Page B

inside: the bald eagles of Illinois and North Dakota and the bear of California and the horse’s head of New Jersey and the strange bleeding pelican of Louisiana. Poe’s office is staffed by handsome, serious-looking Texas men and tough, pretty Texas women who were extremely nice to me but totally ignored all my subsequent e-mail requests for clarifications and follow-up interviews. Although Poe ended the interview by warmly shaking my hand, I suspect that the moment I left the room he told his staff, “That man was an idiot. Ignore all future e-mail requests from him.”
    He recounted to me some of his favorite shamings: “Like the young man who loved the thrill of stealing. I could have put him in jail. But I decided that he had to carry a sign for seven days: I STOLE FROM THIS STORE. DON’T BE A THIEF OR THIS COULD BE YOU . He was supervised. We worked all the security out. I got that down to an art for those people who worried about security. At the end of the week the store manager called me: ‘All week I didn’t have any stealing going on in the store!’ The store manager loved it.”
    â€œBut aren’t you turning the criminal justice system into entertainment?” I said.
    â€œAsk the guy out there,” Ted Poe replied. “He doesn’t think he’s entertaining anybody.”
    â€œI don’t mean him,” I said. “I mean the effect it has on the people watching.”
    â€œThe public liked it.” Poe nodded. “People stopped and talked to him about his conduct. One lady wanted to take him to church on Sunday and save him! She
did!
” Poe let out a big high-pitched Texas laugh. “She said, ‘Come with me, you poor thing!’ End of the week, I brought him back into court. He said it was the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him. It changed his conduct. Eventually, he got a bachelor’s degree. He’s got a business in Houston now.” Poe paused. “I have put my share of folks in the penitentiary. Sixty-six percent of them go back to prison. Eighty-five percent of those people we publicly shamed we never saw again. It was too embarrassing for them the first time. It wasn’t the ‘theater of the absurd,’ it was the theater of the
effective
. It worked.”
    â€”
    Poe was being annoyingly convincing, even though he later admitted to me that his recidivism argument was a misleading one. Poe was far more likely to sentence a first-time offender—someone who was already feeling scared and remorseful and determined to change—to a shaming. But even so, I was learning something about public shaming today that I hadn’t anticipated at all.
    It had started earlier that morning in my hotel room when I telephoned Mike Hubacek, the teenager who had killed two people while driving drunk in 1996. I had wanted him to describe the feeling of being forced to walk up and down the side of the road holding a placard that read I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK . But first we talked about the crash. He told me he spent the first six months after it happened lying in his prison cell, replaying it over and over.
    â€œWhat images did you replay?” I asked him.
    â€œNone,” he replied. “I had completely blacked out during it and I don’t remember anything. But I thought about it daily. I still do. It’s a part of me. I suffered a lot of survivor’s guilt. At the time, I almost convinced myself I was in a living purgatory. I lived to suffer. I went more than a year and a half without looking in a mirror. You learn to shave using your hand as a guide.”
    Being in purgatory, he said, he had resigned himself to a lifetime of incarceration. But then Ted Poe unexpectedly pulled him out. And he suddenly found himself walking up and down the side of the road holding that placard.
    And there on the side of the road, he said, he understood that there was a use for him. He