“Hmm. I’d say more like thirteen,” Vickery mused. “Divorce number one. I remember because I got served with the papers as I was getting into my car to head over to your class for the first time.” He half smiled to himself. “I was feeling all sorry for myself, then I got to campus and there were all these gorgeous students—way too young for me, but still, seeing them reminded me that there might be life after divorce.” He laughed. “But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.”
I smiled. “It might be more entertaining, though.” I looked at the FSU professor. “I’m a physical anthropologist, Dr. Goldman, so I don’t have as much perspective on institutions like prisons and reforms schools as a cultural anthropologist might. I’m trying to wrap my mind about the notion that these two kids—one of them only ten or twelve—might have been killed while they were in protective custody. Is that really a possibility?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Protective custody? Protective of whom? Whatever gave you the idea that a reform school is in any way protective of kids? Reform school is all about protecting the rest of us from kids.”
I felt embarrassed, like a student who’s given a dumb answer in class. “Well, I probably misused the term, but if you’re trying to reform kids, don’t you—the state, I mean, or society—don’t you have a responsibility to keep them safe while they’re in custody?”
“Oh, naive one,” he said kindly. “Let me remove a few of the scales from your innocent eyes.” He handed me a photocopy of a newspaper story, which I saw had been printed in a Miami paper in 1961. “Go ahead, read it,” he encouraged. “But it might make you lose your lunch.”
BOYS FLOGGED FOR BAD GRADES
Students Beaten Bloody at North Florida Boys’ Reformatory
This is not a story for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach.
This is a story about troubled boys, hard men, and the brutal extremes to which “spare the rod, spoil the child” can be taken in the name of discipline.
Twenty miles outside the north Florida hamlet of McNary sits a cluster of white wooden buildings that has the spare appearance of a small army outpost. The structures were built in the 1930s as a Civilian Conservation Corps work camp, but since 1946 they have housed the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory. The institution’s bland and hopeful name belies the violence that is one of its regular routines.
Every Saturday morning boys are lined up and taken into a shed beside the school’s dining hall. Two by two the boys walk in, but often they must be dragged out, because they cannot walk. Their buttocks and thighs have been reduced to raw, bloody pulp by what can only be described as floggings.
School officials say the punishments meted out to boys are strict but fair. “We have to maintain discipline,” said the school’s superintendent, Marvin Hatfield. “We have to be firm. Remember, these are not choir boys we’re working with. These are boys with a history of getting into trouble. We only punish a boy if he gives us a good reason, and we try not to go overboard.”
But boys and men who have endured or witnessed the punishments paint a different picture, one in which children as young as 11 years of age are beaten savagely with a heavy strap. This reporter spoke with four former students who had spent time at the school within the past five years. None of the four was willing to have his name printed, for fear of reprisals. One young man reported receiving 100 lashes with the strap as a punishment for fighting. The other three said they had received anywhere from 20 to 40 lashes for infractions such as smoking, cursing, or simply making bad grades. “I made a C in math,” said one, “and I got 40 licks for that.”
Pressed about the practice of administering beatings for bad grades, Superintendent Hatfield explained and defended the policy. “We expect boys to apply themselves to their studies and make good grades. If they don’t, they receive demerits. If they get too many demerits, they stay here longer. So if a boy is eager to finish up his time and go home, he can volunteer to take a paddling instead of demerits.”
One former school employee offered this description of what Supt. Hatfield calls a paddling. “They take the boys into the shed two at a time,” said the man, who—like the boys interviewed for this story—was unwilling for his name to be printed. “There’s two guards and two boys. There’s a wooden bench and an iron bed in the shed. One boy sits on the bench and waits his turn while the other one is taken to the bed. They make him lie facedown on the mattress and grab hold of the bar at the head of the bed. If he doesn’t lie still and quiet the whole time, they start all over again.”