Disturbing Secrets Emerge After Reform School Closes

The Dozier School for Boys (formerly known as the Florida School for Boys) in Marianna, Fla. was a “reform school” for boys. It was supposed to make them better citizens and mold them into good men. The school was in operation from Jan. 1, 1900 to June 30, 2011. At one point, it was the largest juvenile reform institution in the United States. Since its first scandal in 1903 when investigators (a committee sent by the governor) found boys as young as six-years-old wearing iron chains, the school has become notorious for its harsh punishments.

        In October 2008, five men came forward to share their experiences at the Dozier School for Boys with the public. The Department of Juvenile Justice held a ceremony for the five men to seal the “white house” — a brick building on campus where the men claimed they were tortured. A plaque was placed on the front of the white house that read, “May this building stand as a reminder of the need to remain vigilant in protecting our children as we help them to seek a brighter future.” According to Ben Montgomery, a staff writer for the Tampa Bay Times, the beatings endured by the boys were severe. “When I say ‘tortured’ I mean beaten with a weighted, thick-leather strap until their behinds were lacerated, and their underwear, in some cases, became imbedded into their behinds,” Montgomery said.

The Minaret talked with Montgomery to find out more about the Dozier School for Boys.

The Minaret (M): The abuse for the boys has been the center of focus for the public. What can you say about the abuse? How and why it was kept in the dark for so long?

Ben Montgomery (BM): The abuse came in many forms depending on the period of time here that you’re looking at. In 1903 kids were being locked in irons [chains] like common criminals. Later on, kids were being farmed out for labor to area farmers. In the 50’s and 60’s, some in the 40’s, the abuse took the form of brutal beatings in the building called the “white house” where kids were told to lie face-down on a metal cot and were whipped with a heavy leather-strap until their behinds split open. In the 70’s  and 80’s, after corporal punishment was outlawed in the state constitution, kids were pitted against each other by guards, made to fight. They were hog-tied for long periods of time. They were kept in solitary confinement for weeks and even as recent as 2008, 2009, kids were denied the right to call the state’s abuse line. They were occasionally punched and kicked by guards. They were neglected. Kids with medical issues and mental health issues were not properly cared for according to a recent class-action lawsuit filed against the school. Why did it stay secret? You can argue that it didn’t. There’s been plenty of newspaper reporters and magazine reporters who have showed up on that campus and done stories about the conditions in which these kids were kept. At one point Dozier was  the largest reform school in the country. So, considering that, I think the issue is it’s very easy for the general public to ignore the plight of juvenile delinquency and to simply overlook kids who have committed a crime. Even a crime as minor as truancy or incorrigibility should be treated with respect and dignity and should be reformed as opposed to imprisoned and punished. It’s easy to ignore, and I think Florida citizens bear as much responsibility as the guards in that school.

M: In your article about the boys’ beatings, it says that it “was for their own good” according to the state and the judges who sent them there. The school has also been scrutinized for more than 100 years; how did it slip through the cracks and continue to operate until 2011?

BM: There was much written about this, but I think we have short attention spans as well, so it’s easy to do a big story and stay away from the place and let it go back into darkness without the purifying light of public scrutiny. There’s another point to be made and that is for a long time a lot of strong politicians that have came out of Jackson County [where Marianna is located], and this was a facility that employed more than 300 people at times. It’s a small community, Marianna. It’s a rural county, Jackson County and this was a source for steady jobs for more than a century and so I think over the years it has been comfortably lived under the umbrella of political protection even in the face of horrible scandal.

M: What was the “white house” mentioned in your articles and others? How did the name come about?

BM: There are different stories about that and it’s all folklore at this point. Some of the boys remember hearing that it used to be an ice cream factory or a cold-storage freezer. The way the thing is built that wouldn’t surprise me, but I’m not sure that there’s any validity in that. I do know that some of the boys called it the ice cream factory and it’s where you would go to get ‘whipped’ like ice cream. As for the origin of the name ‘the white house,’ it’s been painted white [the cinder block building where boys were tortured]. I have yet to hear a solid explanation of where that came from. It just seems like all of the men who came to the school and heard it referred to as the white house. Another common colloquialism is “you’re going down” which means you’re making a trip to the white house, so it’s unanswered a little bit.

M: What do you know about the one-armed man, Troy Tidwell?

BM: A lot of the men remember having been beaten by a handful of guards. Mr. Hatten was an administrator at the school for a while. But I’ll tell you this, the majority of them remember having been beaten by the one-armed man, Troy Tidwell, and maybe he stands out in their mind because of his disability. This is a man who is still alive the last I heard and he still lives there in Mariana. He was made to give a deposition in a civil case that was brought by the white house boys against him and the state and the others. He testified  for several hours and was asked specifically if he abused any of the boys and he denied it. He said he never gave a boy more than 10-15 licks and he illustrated for the attorneys how he gave paddlings. The best to explain this is to basically say that he gave them very light strokes. He reenacted something that you would hit your dog harder than that perhaps, so he denied that having abused anybody. Obviously, for the men this did nothing but anger them. In their eyes he is a barbarian and many of them told me that it almost seemed as if he did it for pleasure rather than to try to discipline the boys. He actually got some sort of sadistic kick out of enforcing punishment. He plead the fifth when it came to the criminal investigation. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement wanted to talk to him and he refused to talk which is his right. In the civil case he gave a deposition that lasted four hours or so. They asked him all sorts of questions about it. He denied having ever inflicted abuse. That case was thrown out of court on a technicality and the 300 plus plaintiffs who claimed they were beaten at the Florida School For Boys [an earlier name Dozier went by] are trying to get the legislature to sign a claims bill which would provide some sort of monetary relief for the men who were abused at the hands of the state. There hasn’t been a claims bill filed this year, but there was one last year. It never made it out of committee, so it’s uncertain whether that legal action will ever be resolved. Sometimes these things take decades. Sometimes they never get anywhere.

M: Did you go into the white house when it was opened two weeks ago to the public? If so, what was your experience like?

BM: Yes. It’s a spooky place. I don’t think there were any smiles inside there. I’ve heard stories about that went on for years and this was the first time I went in and I got to say it’s pretty haunting to know what happened there and to be in this dank, musty, old, building. Most of the buildings on that campus have a similar feel. It wasn’t a happy place. I don’t think even Troy Tidwell would tell you it’s a happy place. I talked to one old superintendent there who was maybe the longest running superintendent, Lenox Williams. I feel like he was being fairly candid. He told me ‘look we were forced to deal with at some points 700 students with a staff of 150 people. Some of these kids were decent kids who got mixed up and others were violent-hardcore criminals and we had to do what we had to do to keep power. We were underfunded, understaffed and it was a recipe for some of the barbarity that we’re hearing about.’ This kind of mistreatment didn’t just happen in the white house. It happened in isolation, where in the late 70’s, a child advocate named Jack Levine showed up and found a boy who had no idea how long he’d been locked in a solitary cell. [The boy] pulled his hair out, he was made to urinate and defecate in a bucket. The guard who let Jack visit with this kid had to whack the rusty lock on the door with a Bible in order to get it open. It’s not a good place. The white house is where many of them got a beating that they remembered 50 years later, but it wasn’t limited to that building. … A couple of people were curious about some red streaks on the wall that certainly looked like blood. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement [FDLE] said that they did lab work in there and found no traces of blood. It was enough to convince all the people pretty much who went in that building that it was at least a blood-like substance. There are some etchings on the walls.”

M: What would you say is the most important thing you have learned from covering this story?

BM: Two of the fundamental measures of civilized society is how we treat our children and how we treat our dead and in this case it’s plain to me that we, collectively for 100-plus years, have failed at those two primary obligations and this is why it’s come to a head finally. Maybe we’ve struck a place in our progress where we’re ready to deal with stuff and make amends. Most of us. Some are opposed to this. Some want to leave those dead boys in the ground and leave questions unanswered or say that there are no questions and that everyone died for no reason, nothing suspicious. I think for many of us it’s time to make amends. There have been a lot of people who came out of that place, a state-run institution that should have been governed, should have been ran correctly, and turned to lives of crime. In a more nuanced version men have come out and not known how to carry their emotions, they have carried intense amounts of trauma and have caused other people pain. In a way we all continue to inherit the trauma that came out of that place in terms of crimes they have committed since they were released, in terms of hugs not given, love not shared. I think that’s the lesson: we cannot treat the least members of our society, the juvenile delinquents, as they have been treated at this facility and we all should be vigilant to the extreme about making sure that that kind of thing isn’t happening anywhere in the state, in the country, in the world. That’s a pretty tall order, but that’s the lesson.

Kelly St. Onge can be reached at kelly.stonge@theminaretonline.com