SEXUAL ASSAULTS, AND BEATINGS  STILL OCCURRED IN A REFORM SCHOOL IN IN THE UNITED STATES

In 1980, I was invited by the United Nations to participate as a ‘speaker’ on criminal justice at the Sixth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders that was held in Caracas, Venezuela. I presented two papers. The first one was titled The Need for a Bill of Rights for Young Offenders. Hours after my speech, I was then asked to assist in drafting up the American resolution ordering the Secretariat of the United Nations to conduct studies around the world to look at the feasibility of my proposed bill of rights. The resolution was passed by all 122 countries in attendance the next day at that conference. In 1985, the delegates in the General Assembly voted in favour of the bill of rights for young offenders. It is called, The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules on theAdministration of Juvenile Administration. Recently, the United  Nations placed a blurb in Wikipedia about me by stating that I presented the proposal at the Sixth UN Congress in Caracas and that the American delegation brought in the resolution and that the United Nations conducted studies worldwide and drafted up the bill of rights I had proposed. In 1995, the UN general assembly passed the resolution. 

In 2010, I was invited by the Justice Branch of the United Nations for the purpose of presenting two papers at the Twelvth Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders being   held in Salvador, Brazil. They were; The Treatment of Young Offenders and The Treatment of Mentally Ill

In that speech, I mentioned that despite the bill of rights being passed by the UN General Assembly, the abuses were still being committed against young offenders in correctional facilities. In fact they were even being committed against young offenders in United States young offenders facilities notwithstanding that the Americans had actuallybrought the bill of rights for young offenders to fruition.  This article is about a young offenders facilities for boys that was in Florida.

The Florida School for Boys, also known as the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, was a reform school operated by the state of Florida in the panhandle town of Marianna from January 1, 1900, to June 30, 2011. For a time, it was the largest juvenile reform institution in the United States. A second campus was opened in the town of Okeechobee in 1955.

Throughout its 111-year history, the school gained a reputation for sexual abuse and beatings. Past students claim that they were beaten with a three-foot-long belt until they passed out, while others swear that there was a 'rape room' where some students were sexually abused.

Over the past decade, hundreds of men have come forward to tell gruesome stories of abuse and terrible beatings they suffered at Florida's Dozier School for Boys, a notorious, state-run institution that closed last year after more than a century.

The Dozier School for Boys has been known by several names. It opened in 1900 as the Florida State Reform School on 1,400 acres west of Tallahassee. Throughout its history, the school was known for its harsh conditions and brutal treatment. Over the years, a succession of reports and commissions called for reforms, but little changed.

Known as the "White House Boys," these 300-some men were sent as boys to the reform school in the small panhandle town of Mariana in the 1950s and 1960s. They have joined together over the years to tell their stories of the violence administered in a small building on the school's grounds they knew as the White House.

Some 81 boys are known to have died there, but where their remains are buried is a mystery that researchers are now trying to solve.

"You didn't know when it was coming," says Jerry Cooper, who was sent to the school when he was 16. "These were not spankings. These were beatings, brutal beatings."

Cooper says he did his best to stay out of trouble, but after several weeks, he learned about the beatings firsthand. School staff got him out of bed at 2 a.m. one day and took him to the White House where he says they threw him on a bed, tied his feet and began beating him with a leather strap.

"The first blow lifted me a foot and a half off that bed," Cooper recalls. "And every time that strap would come down, you could hear the shuffle on the concrete because their shoes would slide. And you could hear the shoosh, shoosh, bam."Cooper passed out, but a boy in the next room later told him he counted 135 lashes.

In the mid-1950s. I was the director of programming in a young offenders facility in the Province of Alberta in Canada. In those days, both adult males and young boys in reform schools could be strapped on their bare ass if they did something wrong in any of the correctional facilities . If a staff member witnessed something that was done by an inmate that was serious, that staff member had to strap the offender on his bare ass. Unfortunate, one of the young offenders insulted me in front of the other inmates and I witnessed a larger inmate beating a smaller one. I was ordered to strap both of the offending boys. I didn’t like doing it but it was a requirement of my employment in that institution. Fortunately years later that form of punishment was outlawed in Canada In fact no physical punishment can be used against anyone in Canada  anymore.

Cooper who is 67 now. was sent to what at the time was called the Florida School for Boys in 1961. He'd been running away from home and hitchhiking when he was picked up by an AWOL Marine driving a stolen car.

A county judge charged him with car theft and sent him to the school. Some of the kids like him were charged with crimes. Cooper says others were there for running away from home .

"A lot of orphans were there that did not have places at times and they were sent to Marianna. They weren't there for any crime whatsoever," Cooper says. "But we had many, many boys who was there for smoking in school or that they were incorrigible. We weren't bad kids. We might have needed help in some respect but that wasn't the place to find it.”

A county judge charged him with car theft and sent him to the school. Some of the kids like him were charged with crimes. Cooper says others were there for running away from home or because they didn't have families.

As incredible as it may sound, Cooper's story is not uncommon. There are dozens of White House Boys with similar tales of beatings they received at the school in the 1950s and '60s. Several years ago, they began telling their stories in newspaper accounts and TV reports.

Florida's former Gov. Charlie Crist ordered a state investigation into the allegations of abuse, torture and deaths alleged to have happened at that school. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement interviewed the White House Boys and former staff but said it couldn't find enough evidence to support the allegations. Does anyone believe that the former staff members would tell the investigators everything they saw?

"It all boils down to civil liability," says Roger Kiser, a White House Boy who helped form the group and who has written about his experiences at the school in the late 1950s. "They do not want anybody to be able to have factual evidence that would make them pay for these — what I consider to be crimes."

The state report also found no evidence indicating a staff member was responsible for any student deaths. Kiser doesn't accept the state's conclusion.

"There's just too many stories," Kiser says. "I know of one that I personally saw die in the bathtub that had been beaten half to death. I thought he'd been mauled by the dogs because I thought he had ran away. I never did find out the true story on that. There was the boy I saw who was dead who came out of the dryer. They put him in one of those large dryers."

State investigators said that using school records, they were able to identify 31 former students interred in the school cemetery. Records show 50 other boys also died at the school, with no indication of where most are buried. The reform school had a reputation for a murderous past, with numerous children mysteriously dying and being swiftly cremated while under state care.

Varnadoe is a businessman from Central Florida whose uncle, Thomas, was sent to the school in the 1930s, when he was 13 years old. A month later, he was dead.

Varnadoe wants to exhume his uncle's remains and bring them back for burial in his family's graveyard. He's hoping Kimmerle's research will make that possible. But he believes the cemetery where she's been working isn't the only one on the school grounds.

In the 1990s, Varnadoe visited the school — at that time still open — and asked to see his uncle's grave. He says a school staffer directed him, not to the cemetery where Kimmerle is working, but to another location. "He took me to a second place and said, "Here's where we think the five kids that died in the fire in 1914 are buried my uncle could be buried here."

Varnadoe isn't sure where that second cemetery is located. Kimmerle and many of the White House Boys believe it's on a section of school grounds that's up for sale.

That sale, though, is now on hold. Last week, Varnadoe went to court and secured a temporary injunction that halts the sale until his uncle's remains are found. He said, “There is absolutely no question and no doubt that people that worked at that facility during the late '80s and early '90s knew then and know now that there are other places on the grounds of that school where children are buried."

After blocking them for months, the state now had agreed to allow Kimmerle and her team access to the rest of the school grounds. The White House Boys believe Kimmerle's work will help uncover the truth about what happened at the school. Eventually, they hope to receive an apology and compensation from the state of Florida for the abuse they suffered there.

Using ground penetrating radar, archaeologist Richard Estabrook has identified dozens of previously unknown graves at the school's cemetery. But in recent months, researchers from the University of South Florida have been spending time on the school grounds, working to answer some of those questions.

The sinister pictures offer a glimpse inside a derelict boys' school with a gruesome past, where pupils were said to have been murdered by staff.  The eerie photographs show the site where 55 of the dead were buried, and abandoned classrooms, laden with towering piles of plastic school chairs.

The creepy images were taken at Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, by a 28-year-old photographer known as Bullet, using a Nikon D7000.

Most people would be amazed that places like these exist, especially when they are so close to where they live.

Despite numerous investigations, no-one has been held accountable for the sexual assaults. the beatings and the deaths of the young inmates. 

At its peak in the 1960s, 500 boys were housed at the Dozier school, most of them for minor offenses such as petty theft, truancy or running away from home.

In 1968, when corporal punishment was outlawed at state-run institutions, then-Governor Claude Kirk visited and found the institution in disrepair with leaky ceilings, holes in walls, cramped sleeping quarters, no heating for the winters and buckets used as toilets. 

Researchers exhumed 55 bodies from old graves, which began yielding the shocking secrets of a shuttered Florida reform school, shedding light on decades of abuse, rape and deadly violence. 

Official records showed 31 burials at the Marianna school between its opening in 1900 and its 2011 closure for budget reasons, but researchers found the remains of 24 additional people between September and December 2013. 

Some of the bodies were found under roads or overgrown trees, well away from the white, metal crosses marking the 31 officially recorded graves. 

There was the six-year-old boy who ended up dead after being sent to work as a house boy. And another boy who escaped but was later found shot to death with a blanket pulled over his body and a shotgun across his legs.

Then there was the 'rape dungeon' where students attending the Arthur G. Dozier School were taken and sexually abused by staff members.

'There was a lot of violence which occurred here, either by the students themselves or by the guards,' Bullet added.

'I'm sure there are people who knew of the abuse, but kept quiet about it. I want people to see what happens when nothing is said, when people turn a blind eye to abuse and violence, especially to those who can't defend themselves.'

As incredible as it may sound, Cooper's story is not uncommon. There are dozens of White House Boys with similar tales of beatings they received at the school in the 1950s and '60s. Several years ago, they began telling their stories in newspaper accounts and TV reports.

Florida's former Gov. Charlie Crist ordered a state investigation into the allegations of abuse, torture and deaths alleged at the school. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement interviewed the White House Boys and former staff but said it couldn't find enough evidence to support the allegations.

"It all boils down to civil liability," says Roger Kiser, a White House Boy who helped form the group and who has written about his experiences at the school in the late 1950s. "They do not want anybody to be able to have factual evidence that would make them pay for these — what I consider to be crimes."

The state report also found no evidence indicating a staff member was responsible for any student deaths. Kiser doesn't accept the state's conclusion.

"There's just too many stories," Kiser says. "I know of one that I personally saw die in the bathtub that had been beaten half to death. I thought he'd been mauled by the dogs because I thought he had ran. I never did find out the true story on that. There was the boy I saw who was dead who came out of the dryer. They put him in one of those large dryers."

State investigators said that using school records, they were able to identify 31 former students interred in the school cemetery. Records show 50 other boys also died at the school, with no indication of where most are buried.

But in recent months, researchers from the University of South Florida have been spending time on the school grounds, working to answer some of those questions.

Like a farmer driving a high-tech plow, archaeologist Richard Estabrook pushes cart-mounted ground penetrating radar equipment over an area near the school's old cemetery. Instead of crops, Estabrook is plowing for data — information that identifies gravesites.

He stops pushing for a moment to show what appears as wavy lines on his equipments' screen — signs he's found another grave.

"This sort of disturbance as it goes down there?" Estabrook says, pointing to the monitor. "That's the classic indication of a grave shaft."

Forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle is leading the research at the Dozier school. She's an associate professor at the University of South Florida who became interested in the case after hearing the White House Boys' stories.

At the cemetery — just a clearing in the woods near the school — there are 31 crosses to mark those buried here. But in that section and in surrounding areas, Kimmerle has already identified 49 grave sites. Some, she says, may contain more than one person.

Kimmerle says one question remains hard to answer: Why are there no records of where any of the boys who died at the school are buried?

"When you look at the state hospital, the state prisons, the other state institutions at the time, there are very meticulous plat maps you can reference," Kimmerle says. "Or if you are a family member today, you can say, 'Where is my great-aunt buried?' and they can show you exactly where. So, why that didn't happen here, I don't know. But that does stand out."

Kimmerle says identifying who's buried in the graves would require exhuming the bodies — something that can be done only if a family member of one of the deceased requests it.

         

Despite numerous investigations, no-one has been held accountable for the sexual assaults, the beatings or the deaths of the children in state care    

Is this the last time we will hear of such things going on in young offenders facilities? I thought it was until l learned in 2010, that  there were still young offender facilities in the United States and elsewhere bringing horrors to the young offenders in their care. Many of them were later closed down. But do some still exist?