The Bone Yard (10 page)

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.”

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.”

“What about counseling and drug treatment and other services that kids get once they’re part of the system? Don’t those make a difference?”

“Interesting question.” He caught the eye of the waitress and beckoned, and she nodded in an I’ll-be-right-there sort of way. “There was a really ambitious and well-funded project in Massachusetts back in the 1930s and ’40s—the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study, it was called. It was designed to identify kids who were at high risk of becoming criminals, and to provide them with all sorts of educational and medical and social services to steer them toward solid, productive lives.” I searched my memory banks for any scrap of knowledge I might have about it, and I came up dry. “Kids and parents and social-worker types
loved
it,” he went on. “It became the gold standard, the holy grail, for juvenile services. Kids who completed the program were tracked and interviewed, and years later, they were still saying glowing things about it. Things like, ‘That program saved my life,’ and ‘Without that program, I’d have ended up in prison.’ Impressive, huh?”

“Sounds great,” I said.

“But here’s the kicker. So here’s this legendary model program, right? But another twenty years down the road, when the kids were now middle-aged, some new researchers did a follow-up study, and guess what? The kids who’d gotten all that great help actually turned out worse than similar kids who
didn’t
get the help. The Cambridge-Somerville kids were more likely to have committed serious crimes, or turned alcoholic, or gone crazy, or died, compared to the control group—a group of other high-risk kids who’d gotten
nothing
. Leaving kids the hell alone turned out to be better for them than this gold-plated program, which actually proved harmful.”

“So you’re saying the answer is to do nothing? The best way to keep them from drifting into crime is to look the other way?”

He shrugged. “You know the biggest single factor that steers boys away from crime? Getting a girlfriend.”

Angie gave a brief laugh. “So instead of sending them to juvie, we should sign them up for Match.com?”

He smiled. “Maybe. Delinquency is something kids outgrow—unless we confirm them as ‘delinquents’ and lock them up with other, older delinquents, who teach them worse things; who teach them to be better, badder criminals.”

What he was saying had a certain logic to it, but it seemed to dodge the bigger question of social responsibility. “But what’s the chicken, and what’s the egg? How do you separate cause from effect? I mean, kids don’t just get randomly snatched up and sent to lockup for no reason. A kid has to do something to get pulled into the system in the first place, right? Steal a car, rob a store, vandalize a school, or
something
?”

“Something,” he conceded. “But that ‘something’ can be as simple as being defiant at home. Or playing hooky a few times. Or living with a single mother who gets arrested, so the kid gets sent to a foster home, where maybe he gets abused and starts doing drugs and it all goes to hell from there. Tiny, tiny things can start kids spiraling down the rabbit hole, especially if all the kid has done is pick the wrong parents or the wrong color skin or the wrong socioeconomic class.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I’d lived long enough to recognize that random luck—good luck and bad luck—could play a big role in shaping a kid’s life; after all, what if my grandsons had been born in black skin instead of white skin? Had been born in Darfur or Rwanda instead of in Tennessee? But I wanted an answer, a solution, so I pressed him. “So what would you do if
you
ran the circus? Just open the cages and let out all the animals?” I’d intended for the second question to be a witty riff on the old cliché, but it came out harsh and judgmental. “Sorry. I didn’t really mean that the way it sounded.” At least, I
hoped
I didn’t. He waved off the apology, though I thought I saw a flicker of disappointment in his eyes. “But seriously, what would you do?”

“I’d light a single candle, and I’d keep cursing the darkness. I’d try to bring evildoers to justice, especially the evildoers who hide behind uniforms.” He took a breath, gearing up. “I’d redistribute wealth. I’d do away with poverty and disease. I’d close the prisons, and spend all those billions of dollars on schools and health care and jobs instead.” The waitress appeared at our table, and he beamed at her. “And I’d love a dozen oysters, with extra horseradish and lemon.” She scurried toward the kitchen with the order. “Sorry to get on my soapbox, but I’m appalled by how much money and how much human potential we squander locking people up. What if society renounced the right to use violence against kids—what if we just said, ‘We don’t do that’?”

“It’s a complicated problem,” I acknowledged. “And except for the oysters, those things you’re talking about aren’t quick fixes. They’d require fundamental changes in our whole society.”

“God, I sure hope so.”

I nodded at the newspaper article he’d brought me. “May I keep this?”

“Of course.”

I folded the page and tucked it into my pocket. “At least this school isn’t still in business. Let’s hope that sort of brutality is a thing of the past.”

He gave me an ironic smile. “Martin Lee Anderson.”

“Excuse me?”

“Martin Lee Anderson. Look him up. You won’t have any trouble finding him.”

T
hirty minutes after I’d happily polished off seven Apalachicola Bay oysters, I settled myself in front of a computer at the Leon County Public Library, in downtown Tallahassee, and typed “Martin Lee Anderson” into the Google search bar. In a fraction of a second—thirteen one-hundredths of a second, the screen informed me—the search engine found 7,600,000 hits. I clicked on the first one, a Wikipedia entry ominously titled “Martin Anderson death controversy,” and began to read: “Martin Lee Anderson (c. January 15, 1991–January 6, 2006) was a 14-year-old from Florida who died while incarcerated at a boot-camp-style youth detention center, the Bay County Boot Camp, located in Panama City, Florida, and operated by the Bay County Sheriff’s Office. Anderson collapsed while performing required physical training at the camp. While running track, he stopped and complained of fatigue. The guards coerced him to continue his run, but then he collapsed and died.”

It sounded like a sad accident, but hardly the same sort of abuse as the reform school beatings detailed by the article Goldman had brought me. Over the years, I’d read many stories of teenage athletes—usually high school football players—who died of heatstroke or heart failure during hot summer practices.

But the more I read about Anderson’s death, the less it seemed to be simply a sad accident. A YouTube video, taken from a surveillance camera, had recorded how the guards “coerced” Anderson. The image was grainy, and the view was often obscured by the cluster of guards, but the clip seemed to show the black boy being knocked to the ground, dragged around, and subjected to punches and choke holds by a group of seven guards. During most of the “coercion”—which continued for half an hour—a nurse stood by and watched; eventually, she knelt down and used a stethoscope to listen for a heartbeat, and after she did, two guards jogged away to summon emergency medics. But by then it was too late.

What I saw on the video was disturbing, but what I read was even more disturbing. The local medical examiner initially ruled that Martin Anderson’s death was an accident caused by sickle-cell trait, a blood disorder in African Americans that sometimes distorts red blood cells, limiting their capacity to carry oxygen. But the boy’s family and the NAACP challenged the M.E.’s findings and demanded a further investigation. The U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation, the original medical examiner was fired, and the boy’s body was exhumed for a second autopsy by a different M.E. The investigation revealed that Anderson’s mouth had been covered by guards while ammonia capsules were held beneath his nostrils. The second M.E. reached a far different conclusion from the first one. With his mouth clamped shut and ammonia fumes repeatedly forced up his nose, Martin Lee Anderson, age fourteen, died of suffocation.

The end of the video clip showed the boy’s limp body being hoisted onto a gurney and wheeled away—barely two hours after he’d gotten off the bus for his first day of boot camp.

The more things change
, I thought,
the more things stay the same.
No wonder Goldman had given me that sad, ironic smile when I’d said that brutality to kids was a thing of the past.