The main story here was inspired by events and stories from an actual north Florida reform school, one that—unlike our fictional school—still exists. Opened in 1900 as the Florida State Reform School, the institution has gone by several other names during its history, including the Florida School for Boys, the Florida Industrial School for Boys, and the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys.
Whatever the name, the school has been plagued by deaths and scandals down through the decades. Just three years after it opened, a state senate committee found boys “in irons, like common criminals.” In 1911, a special legislative committee investigated reports of severe beatings with a leather strap—beatings that, the legislators were assured, had ceased with the firing of the superintendent who had sanctioned them. In1914, a fire at the school killed two employees and eight boys. A grand jury investigation of the fire found that the boys’ dormitory was locked while three guards and the superintendent visited the nearby town of Marianna “upon some pleasure bent.”
In 1958, a U.S. Senate committee investigation heard testimony about brutal conditions at Dozier . . . including severe beatings with a heavy leather strap. In 1967, a U.S. Department of Health official called the school a “monstrosity.” A few months later, Florida’s then-governor, Claude Kirk, visited the school and described it as a training ground for a life of crime. Kirk also called the school’s conditions “absolutely deplorable” and said, “If one of your kids were kept in such circumstances, you’d be up there with rifles.” As late as the 1980s, boys at the school were still being hog-tied, with their arms and legs fastened together beind their backs.
Several years ago, a handful of the school’s former students banded together in an informal organization called “The White House Boys,” named for the small, whitewashed concrete building in which the beatings were administered regularly on Saturdays. Their Web site, www.WhiteHouseBoys.org, shares numerous accounts of beatings and sexual abuse in the White House and in the basementlike “rape room” under the school’s dining hall.
In an unusual and poignant ceremony, Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice officially “sealed” the White House in October 2008. Former students were invited to speak at the sealing ceremony, and several talked of the abuses they’d suffered within the building’s walls. A plaque affixed to the building bears these words: In memory of the children who passed these doors, we acknowledge their tribulations and offerour 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 we help them seek a brighter future.
The White House is one grim emblem of the reform school’s troubled past. Another is a small cemetery, tucked away in what was once the “colored” part of the school’s grounds. The cemetery, whose revelation made headlines in 2009, contains thirty-one crosses, made of welded metal pipes. At the request of then-Governor Charlie Crist, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigated the cemetery, eventually concluding that the number of crosses corresponded with records identifying thirty-one individuals who had died and been buried at the school (including one student murdered by four others, who feared the boy was about to reveal their plan to escape). FDLE did not excavate or map the cemetery; consequently, there was no attempt to match graves with the number and location of the crosses, or any attempt to confirm the identity of individual human remains. The agency reported to Governor Crist that it found “no evidence that the school or the staff caused, or contributed to, any of these deaths” and “no evidence that the school or its staff made any attempts to conceal the deaths of any students at the school.”
And perhaps that is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But accounts by former students—including members of the White House Boys—hint at additional, unmarked graves on the property. And even the FDLE investigation found evidence that another fifty boys had died at the school over the years, but that their remains were unaccounted for.