The Bone Yard

by Jefferson Bass

  Goldman shook my hand, then eyed the last two oysters on our plate hungrily. “I hope you told them to save a few dozen of those for me.”

  “I can’t promise it,” I said. “You’ve been welcome to my share up to now, but we might be competing from here on out.”

  He grinned. “I’ve been a regular here for thirty years. I might have a slight edge if the supply runs short.”

  Goldman and Vickery squeezed into chairs alongside Angie and me at the cramped table. Goldman craned his head in search of our waitress, but she was busy with another table at the moment. “Stu’s been guest-lecturing in my criminology classes for the last, what, ten years or so?”

  “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.”

  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 m
e 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.”

  Thirty 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.