They were screwed-up kids, sent to the reform school in Marianna for smoking, fighting, stealing cars or worse. The Florida School for Boys -- that'd straighten them out.
Fifty years later they are, by their own account, screwed-up men -- afraid of the dark, unable to love or be loved, twisted by anger, scarred by the whippings they endured in a cinder block hell called the White House.
100 years later and it's still hell
Bloody noses. Broken bones. At the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, reform seems to be mostly in the rhetoric.
(Oct. 11, 2009)
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Hell's 1,400 Acres
A story published March 31, 1968 in the St. Petersburg Times
Book: The White House Boys: An American Tragedy The story of the horrors recalled by Roger Dean Kiser, one of the boys incarcerated at the facility in the late fifties for the crime of being a confused, unwanted, and wayward child.