Posted on Sunday, 10.19.08
JUVENILE JUSTICE
Reform school alumni recount severe beatings, rapes
Half a century ago, victims say, vicious beatings and rapes ruled the day at Florida State Reform School.
BY CAROL MARBIN MILLER
cmarbin@MiamiHerald.com
MARIANNA -- The Florida State Reform School -- more dungeon than deliverance for much of its 108-year history -- has kept chilling secrets hidden behind red-brick walls and a razor wire fence amid the gently rolling hills of rural North Florida.
Established by state lawmakers in 1897 as a high-minded experiment where ''young offenders, separated from the vicious, may receive careful, physical, intellectual and moral training,'' the reformatory instead became a Dickensian nightmare.
Three years after the facility opened, kids were found chained in irons. A 1914 fire took six young lives while guards ''were in town upon some pleasure bent,'' records say. And in the 1980s, advocates sued to stop the state from shackling and hogtying children there.
On Tuesday, about a half-dozen alumni will return to what is now called the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys to confront the most painful chapter of their troubled lives.
The White House Boys, as a group of grown men now call themselves -- kept one of the institution's most shameful secrets for half a century: what was done to them inside a squat, dark, cinder-block building called The White House.
There, they say, guards beat them ferociously with a lash, some dozens of times. Some men say they also were sexually abused in a crawl space below the dining hall they call the ``rape room.''
State juvenile justice administrators, who have not denied the allegations, will dedicate a memorial to the suffering of The White House Boys -- who found one another through the Internet -- at a formal ceremony at the Marianna campus Tuesday.
They number in the hundreds, perhaps even thousands.
REVISITING HISTORY
In recent weeks, in a bid to improve transparency, administrators have lifted the veil of secrecy that surrounded Dozier and programs like it, allowing The Miami Herald to review century-old records and tour the remote campus.
Robert Straley, 64, a Clearwater man who sells novelties at city events and music festivals throughout the South, still recalls vividly what happened to him in the white stucco cracker house in March 1963.
The instrument of his torment was a long leather strap -- like the kind used in old-fashioned barber shops, except that part of it was made of sheet metal.
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