The strap used to administer the beatings is designed to inflict serious pain, according to the man. “The strap is five feet long and four inches wide, with a wooden handle at one end. It looks like the leather strop that a barber uses to sharpen a straight razor, but it’s thicker and heavier than that. It’s two layers of leather with a thin layer of metal sewn in between the layers.
“Swinging the strap is a well-honed skill,” he added. “The guard takes a big windup, like a baseball pitcher or a tennis player. He swings his arm up over his head and then brings it down. The end of the strap whips across the ceiling and down the wall before it hits the boy. You can tell the boy hears it coming, because he’ll stiffen up and try to brace for it when he hears it hit the ceiling. There are strap marks all over the ceiling and all down the wall.”
The young man who said he’d received 100 lashes for fighting said it was the worst pain he could imagine. “I thought I would die,” he said. “I wished I would die. They had to carry me to the infirmary. I couldn’t walk for a week, and I had scabs for a month. I still have the scars. I guess I always will.”
Critics of corporal punishment have repeatedly called for a ban on the practice at the school, but those calls have gone unheeded for years.
And so, year after year, the floggings continue.
“There’s blood all over that shed,” said the former school employee. “There’s blood on the floor, blood on the walls, blood on the ceiling. There’s blood on people’s hands.”
I looked up, and Goldman raised his eyebrows in a question. I handed the article back to him. “Terrible,” I said. “Like something out of the Inquisition. Or antebellum slavery.”
“Or Abu Ghraib,” he said. “Or Gitmo.”
I didn’t want to argue the politics. “But these were kids. Wasn’t it illegal?”
“Funny how that worked,” he said. “Beatings aren’t allowed—and weren’t allowed back then—in adult prisons. But corporal punishment was permissible for juveniles. The rule was—the trick was—it had to be the sort of punishment a ‘loving parent’ would give.”
I tried to reconcile the contradictions, but they were like magnets whose poles couldn’t be forced together. “A loving parent? Beating a twelve-year-old boy a hundred times with a five-foot strap?” I imagined children who were only slightly older than my own grandsons—ages eight and ten—being beaten until they couldn’t walk. Goldman was right: the idea nearly made me sick. “It was torture. How did they keep getting away with it?”
He shrugged. “Nobody really gave a damn about those kids. Some were orphans, some had parents that were glad to have the state take the kids off their hands for a while, or forever.” He made a face of distaste. “You know the best way to create career criminals?” He didn’t give me much time to consider the question before he supplied the answer himself. “Bring them into the juvenile justice system to ‘reform’ them.”
“Oh, surely that’s too cynical a view,” I argued. “If they’ve come to the attention of the juvenile justice system, they’re already in trouble, aren’t they? It doesn’t seem fair to call the system itself part of the problem.”
“Part of the problem? The system might be the whole problem. America’s criminal justice system is like a self-replicating computer virus. There are more than two million people behind bars in this country. We have the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on earth.” I’d heard that before, so it wasn’t a total surprise, but what Goldman went on to say was a different perspective than I’d heard before. “By their mid-thirties, one-third of black male high school graduates have spent time behind bars; more than sixty percent of black high school dropouts have. You know when that trend began?” I shook my head; I didn’t. “In the 1960s, right around the time the civil rights movement started making headway.” Put in that context, the statistics seemed especially troubling. “And most of it starts with kids. Train up a child in the way he should go, the proverb says, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” I’d never heard that repeated with such irony. “The one thing our juvenile justice system excels at is creating career criminals. That’s the biggest predictor for becoming a career criminal: being incarcerated as a juvenile. And the cost of incarcerating juveniles is huge, not just for food and guards and barbed wire, but for all those adult prisons we have to build to house them once they’re grown-up criminals. We could save a couple of million bucks for every career criminal we didn’t create, if we’d stop creating them.”