Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (47 page)

O'McCarthy never saw Woody again. Much later—after O'McCarthy, Straley, and other Dozier survivors instigated an investigation into unexplained disappearances like Woody's—thirty-one metal crosses were found behind the facility.

Over the years, Dozier has weathered more cycles of exposure, investigation, litigation, and scandal than one might think a single institution could withstand. But Dozier persisted, as did the brutality taking place behind its walls, making the institution a powerful symbol not only of the ubiquity of abuse within juvenile prisons but of the inherently toxic nature of the institution itself.

“The real recidivism problem in juvenile corrections is not the rate
at which kids re-offend,” the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Bart Lubow observed, “but the regularity with which state youth corrections agencies repeat the same cycle of abuse, scandal, reform and regression.” This institutional recidivism, said Lubow, is evidence that “the problems with these facilities are systemic and inherent, rather than a function of individual leaders or particular eras.”

Abuse of young prisoners persists in state after state, including those lauded for their reform efforts. In the long view, there is
nothing
—neither investigation, litigation, monitoring, nor oversight; not public censure, court order, or the mandates of the U.S. Constitution—powerful enough to stem the brutality that is part of daily life inside our nation's juvenile prisons, short of the courage to close the places down.

Dozier has emerged as a symbol of this cycle not only because of the extremity of the torments that children endured there, but also because of the determination of those who survived them. After the death of a boy at a Florida boot camp made the news, these now-adult survivors sought out one another, forming a coalition they called “the White House Boys,” named for the outbuilding where they had been taken for beatings at Dozier. Silenced as children, these grown men, some well into retirement, found a collective voice that was strong enough to force the state of Florida to face what it had done to them and so many others—delinquent or neglected children, runaways and throwaways, anyone the state decreed in need of reform.

Reporters from the
St. Petersburg Times
interviewed a number of these men. All had discovered as children that the stately, collegiate building on the pine-dotted campus was cover for something more sinister than a “school”: a torture mill through which children were churned for generations.

The men remember the same things: blood on the walls, bits of lip or tongue on the pillow, the smell of urine and whiskey, the way the bed springs sang with each blow. The way they cried out for Jesus or Mama. The grinding of the old fan that muffled their cries. The one-armed man who swung the strap.

They remember walking into the small, dark building—the White House—in bare feet and white pajamas, afraid they'd never walk out.

Roger Dean Kiser, a twelve-year-old orphan when he was sent to Dozier, went on to write a memoir about his experience there. He also wrote a
letter to Florida state officials, describing what took place after a staff member accused him of cursing.

The two men picked me up and carried me into a small room, which had nothing in it except a bunk bed and a pillow. They put me down on the floor and ordered me to lie on the bed facing the wall. . . . I felt one of the men reach under the pillow and slowly pull something out. I turned over quickly and looked at the one who was standing near me. He had a large leather strap in his hand.

“Turn your damn head back toward the wall!” he yelled.

I knew what was going to happen and it was going to be very bad. I had been told what to expect by some of the boys, who were taken to the “White House.” I never heard from some of them again. I also heard that this giant strap was made of two pieces of leather, with a piece of sheet metal sewn in between the halves. Again, everything was dead silent. I remember tightening my buttocks as much as I could. Then I waited and waited, and waited. I remember someone taking a breath, then a footstep. I turned over very quickly and looked toward the man with the leather strap. There was an ungodly look on his face and I knew he was going to beat me to death. . . .

Then all of a sudden, it happened. I thought my head would explode. The thing came down on me over and over. I screamed and kicked and yelled as much as I could, but it did no good. He just kept beating me over and over. . . .

God, God, God, it hurt badly. I will never forget that until the day I die.

Kiser received several responses to his letter, all of which followed a similar trajectory: sympathy, shock, and a firm effort to distance the state from his suffering by situating the abuse at Dozier in some faint and distant past.

Judge Kathleen A. Kearney, responding on behalf of then governor Jeb Bush, reassured Kiser that “corporal punishment” had been banned in Florida state institutions for more than thirty years. “I am pleased to say
that children do not have to endure that kind of experience today. Now, a 24-hour abuse hotline is available to everyone and state law requires that specified state employees report any abuse or neglect that they observe.”

Timothy Ring of the Client Relations Office at the Department of Children and Families professed himself “stunned that anyone could be so cruel to a child.” But he was also “comforted,” he assured Kiser, “to know the people . . . [at] the Department of Children and Families here in Jacksonville, really are dedicated to ensuring that all children enjoy their right to a happy and healthy childhood.”

As I studied the events at Dozier, I found nothing so chilling as a
videotaped deposition of an elderly Troy Tidwell, remembered by the boys as “the one-armed man” who administered many of the lashings.

Tidwell settled in with a polite smile, showing no sign of anxiety. An old man by this time, Tidwell had receding gray hair brushed straight back from his forehead and a slight quaver in his otherwise easy drawl. The attorney who took his deposition treated him with the deference reserved for the aged, even using Tidwell's preferred term for what took place in the White House: “spanking.”

A weak smile flashed across Tidwell's face as the inquiry began. He leaned forward in his chair obligingly and squinted at the questioner, as if indicating a willingness to try his very best.

“When you would spank the boys,” the attorney asked, “describe for us what kind of swing you would take with that leather strap you described for us.”

“Well, me with one hand, I'd bring the strap back this-away and come down.”

Tidwell clenched his hand around an imaginary implement, then lowered it in slow motion from his shoulder to the table. The horror of the gesture—one that left many of those who were “spanked” with permanent scars—was undiminished by the liver spots on the old man's hand.

“You wouldn't ever use a full swing, maybe even nick the ceiling and come down?”

“Nah, nah, that would be somebody else that would use a different”—Tidwell repeated the swing in miniature, smiling faintly as he did so, as if trying to remain patient with a rather dim child—“than I did.”

“Did others? Did Mr. Hatton?”

“Well, the tall people, you know, they would spank 'em like this, you know, and come down.” That gesture again, with a longer, more powerful arc. Tidwell's heavy gold watch glinted as his arm, once more, descended.

Several of the White House Boys wrote a song about their experience at Dozier. In
the video they produced to accompany it, a man stands in silhouette, bringing a leather strap down again and again in slow, deliberate strokes. These swings of the strap resemble Tidwell's own reenactment closely in their timing, pace, and particular arc. In the boys' reenactment, however, it is clear that the full force of a grown man's body is behind each stroke.

The events at Dozier have been “exposed” over and over, investigated more thoroughly than the Watergate break-in, repeatedly condemned but never contained, allowing one generation after another to suffer untold trauma.

In this regard, Dozier is anything but an anomaly. The institution may reflect the extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to the maltreatment of incarcerated youth, but it is far from unique in its apparent immunity to reform. In this, it reflects both the fundamentally dehumanizing nature of the juvenile prison and the ultimate futility of any reform effort aimed at salvaging an intrinsically corrupt institution.

Reports from state representatives assigned to investigate Dozier underscore the voices of survivors. “We found them in irons, just as common criminals,” a legislative committee reported in 1903. The segregated section where black youth were held “impressed your committee as being more in the nature of a convict camp, than anything else we can think of,” reported another, in 1911.

A state inspector offered the following in 1918:
“Thirty five cases of pneumonia . . . boys lying under wool blankets, naked. With dirty husk mattresses on the cement floor . . . filth, body lice. . . . [Black boys' dinner] was hoe cake and bacon grease thickened with flour. The dinner of the white boys was rice and bacon grease gravy. . . . One boy said he was flogged for refusing to cook peas full of worms and that meat sent to the boys was kept until spoiled and then fed [to] them and they were all sick.”

As troubling as the abuses detailed in these reports are the dates on which they and others like them were submitted: 1903 (Investigative
Committee to the Florida Senate); 1911 (Report from Investigative Committee); 1915 (Jackson County Grand Jury); and 1958 (U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency).
Reforms were ordered, according to an investigation by the
Tampa Bay Times
, in 1909, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1920, 1921, 1953, 1963, 1968, 1976, 1982, and 2007. The events at Dozier, in other words, were
never
a secret. Official findings started coming in more than a century ago and continued for decades, but still the building stood, protected by a shield not of lies but of indifference.

Again and again, official bodies looked into Dozier. Over and over, they found evidence that children were being brutalized by state employees entrusted with their care. And time after time, their reports were filed and forgotten—until the next round of investigators found the same or worse.

Boys who were paying their debt to society for stealing bicycles or cutting school learned from this that there were two sets of rules. One was for them—the powerless, with no rights worth respecting—and the other for their omnipotent captors, permitted all and accountable to none. This persistent double standard served to underscore the message that the boys were less than human. Along with post-traumatic stress from the beatings themselves, it would play a part in driving some survivors mad.

In 2008, with Dozier still open, the state of Florida acquiesced to the persistent advocacy of the White House Boys and ceremoniously shuttered the shack where boys had been tortured for decades. The day it closed the White House, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice mounted a cautiously worded plaque on its exterior wall.

In memory of the children who passed these doors we acknowledge their tribulations and offer our hope that they have found some measure of peace.

May this building stand as a reminder of the need to remain vigilant in protecting our children as they seek a brighter future.

Tragically, the story did not end there. Nor did the abuse.

This may be the darkest turn in the White House Boys' long journey. Despite all they had experienced—unheeded cries as boys and years of silence after—the survivors kept faith in the power of their collective
voice, sustaining themselves by believing that the truth would, if not set
them
free, at least protect other youths from reliving their suffering.

On this front, the state of Florida has yet to redeem their faith.

On the very day the plaque went up, it would later be revealed, 130 Dozier wards were kept inside the building, away from the press who had gathered for the ceremony.

“When the media was around, they would hide us,” one of them later told the
Tampa Bay Times
. “They didn't want us saying a word to anybody, because they knew what we would say. We'd tell the truth.”

The truth was that abuse remained rampant at Dozier even after the White House was formally closed—after the plaques and promises, the photo ops and the “never again”s. Throughout the decade in which the state negotiated with the White House Boys to arrange a ceremony commemorating their suffering (situating it firmly in the past in the process), even as officials reassured Kiser that children in state custody enjoyed the “right to a happy and healthy childhood,” reports of abuse at Dozier continued to pour in.

Five months before the plaque went up, a boy had his ear sewn back together after a “scuffle” with staff. A month later, a guard punched a boy in the face three times and slammed him into a fence. Another reportedly “stuffed a boy in a laundry bag, and when the boy tried to chew through the strings . . . encouraged others to scratch and pinch him.” Yet another broke a “broom on a refrigerator, then chased [a] boy with the sharp end. The guard grabbed the boy in a headlock and fractured his jaw.”
One boy, who had been kicked and stomped by other youths and then placed in isolation, asked to call the abuse hotline. His request was denied.
Other boys later reported that when they asked to call the hotline to report abuse, they were warned that if they did so they could face criminal charges for false reporting. They “wipe their a—with grievances,” another ward summarized.