Florida School for Boys
The Florida School for Boys, also known as the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, was a reform school operated by the state of Florida in the panhandle town of Marianna from January 1, 1900, to June 30, 2011. A second campus was opened in the town of Okeechobee in 1955. For a time, it was the largest juvenile reform institution in the United States.
Throughout its 111-year history, the school gained a reputation for abuse, beatings, rapes, torture, and even murder of students by staff. Despite periodic investigations, changes of leadership, and promises to improve, the cruelty and abuse continued.
After the school failed a state inspection in 2009, the governor ordered a full investigation. Many of the historic and recent allegations of abuse and violence were confirmed by separate investigations by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in 2010, and by the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice in 2011. State authorities closed the school permanently in June 2011. At the time of its closure, it was a part of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.
Because of questions about the number of deaths at the school and a high number of unmarked graves, the state granted permission for a forensic anthropology survey by Erin Kimmerle of the University of South Florida in 2012. Her team identified 55 burials on the grounds, most outside the cemetery, and documented nearly 100 deaths at the school. In January 2016, Kimmerle issued her final report, having made seven DNA matches and 14 presumptive identifications of remains. They continued to work on identification. Three times as many black as white students died and were buried at Dozier. USF's report noted that excluding a 1914 event in which an estimated six to ten white children were killed in a fire, the racial balance of deaths was consistent with the school's overall population demographics.
After passage of resolutions by both houses of the legislature, on April 26, 2017, the state held a formal ceremony to apologize personally to two dozen survivors of the school and to families of other victims. In 2018, bills were being considered to provide some compensation to victims and their descendants, possibly as scholarships for children.
In 2019, during preliminary survey work for a pollution clean-up, a further 27 suspected graves were identified by ground-penetrating radar.
In 2024, to compensate the victims of The Dozier School for Boys carried by Representative Michelle Salzman and Senator Darryl Rouson was approved by the state legislature and signed into law.
Campus and structure
From its opening in 1900, the Marianna site was an open campus of about 1400 acres without any perimeter fencing. The site was originally divided into two sub-campuses, South Side or "Number 1", for white students, and North Side, or "Number 2", for "colored" students. The sections were segregated until 1966.A cemetery was located on the North Side, known as the Boot Hill Cemetery. Most of the graves were unmarked, and records of many of the documented 100 students who died at the facility were lacking. A 2014 report from an extensive forensic investigation, carried out by Erin Kimmerle, Ph.D. from the University of South Florida beginning in 2011, said the buried remains of 55 students were found, including numerous remains found outside the cemetery boundaries, in the woods or brush areas. Kimmerle's team has been trying to identify them, some through the use of DNA, but many were still unidentified by the time the report was issued. In 1990–91, the North Side campus was permanently closed.
Image:FlaIndusSchBoys pr24642.png|thumb|right|300px|Dining hall construction with "White House" in background, 1936
In 1929, an 11-room concrete block detention building, also containing cells, was constructed to house incorrigible or violent students. The site was not originally fenced. Students called it "The White House."
In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the site of most staff beatings of students. Black boys were also punished in the form of whippings and beatings in the White House, but were detained in segregated isolation cells on the "colored" side of campus.
After corporal punishment at the school was abolished in 1967, the building was used for storage. In 2008, in response to allegations of the extreme beatings and torture that took place there, state officials sealed the building in a public ceremony, leaving a memorial plaque. It has remained empty since.
At the time of the US Justice Department investigation in 2010–11, shortly before the facility was closed, Dozier was a fenced, 159-acre "high-risk" residential facility for 104 boys aged 13 to 21 who had been committed there by a court. Their average length of stay at Dozier was nine to twelve months. They lived in several cottages, with each boy having a room that was unlocked during the day and locked at night.
On an adjacent site was the Jackson Juvenile Offender Center, a "maximum-risk" facility for chronic offenders guilty of felonies or violent crimes. It housed residents in single, locked cells like a prison.
History
According to the 2010 abuse investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the school was first organized under an 1897 act of the legislature and began operations on the Marianna campus on January 1, 1900, as the Florida State Reform School. It was overseen by five commissioners appointed by the governor William Dunnington Bloxham, who were to operate the school and make biennial reports to the legislature.At some time thereafter, the commissioners were replaced by the governor and cabinet of Florida, acting as the Board of Commissioners of State Institutions. In 1914, the name was changed to the Florida Industrial School for Boys and in 1957 to the Florida School for Boys. In 1955, the Okeechobee campus opened. In 1967, the name of the Marianna campus was changed to the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, in honor of a former superintendent of the school.
In 1903, an inspection reported that children at the school were commonly kept in leg irons. According to the 2012 interim report by the University of South Florida, which was commissioned to investigate the cemetery and burials, the school was investigated by the state six times during its first 13 years of operation.
A fire in a dormitory at the school in 1914 killed an estimated six to ten students and two staff members. Eleven students were recorded as having died in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, but they were not named.
A 13-year-old boy sent to the school in 1934 for "trespassing" died 38 days after arriving there. Recorded burials at the Boot Hill Cemetery took place from 1914 to 1952.
1960s
In 1968, Florida Governor Claude Kirk said, after a visit to the school where he found overcrowding and poor conditions, that "somebody should have blown the whistle a long time ago." At this time, the school housed 564 boys, some for offenses as minor as school truancy, running away from home, or "incorrigibility", including cigarette smoking. They ranged in age from ten to sixteen years old. The White House was closed in 1967. Officially, corporal punishment at the school was banned in August 1968.In 1969, as part of a governmental reorganization, the school came under the management of the Division of Youth Services of the newly created Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. In 1996, HRS was reorganized as the Florida Department of Children and Families.
According to a 2009 report following investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, there were 81 school-related deaths of students from 1911 to 1973. Thirty-one of these boys were said to be buried on the school grounds, with other bodies "shipped home to families or buried in unknown locations." There are 31 simple crosses as grave markers at the cemetery, installed in the 1960s and 1990s, but they have been found not to correspond to specific burials. The 2012 Interim Report by Kimmerle, her team found a total of 98 documented deaths at the school from 1914 to 1973, including two staff members.
1980s and 1990s
In 1982, an inspection revealed that boys at the school were "hogtied and kept in isolation for weeks at a time". The ACLU filed a lawsuit over this and similar mistreatment at a total of three juvenile facilities in Florida. By this time, the Dozier School was housing 105 boys aged thirteen to twenty-one.In 1985, the media reported that young ex-students of the school, sentenced to jail terms for crimes committed at Dozier, had subsequently been the victims of torture by guards at the Jackson County jail. The prison guards typically handcuffed the teenagers and hanged them from the bars of their cells, sometimes for over an hour. The guards said their superiors approved the practice and that it was routine.
Federal lawsuits concerning school conditions resulted in the Department of Justice's monitoring Florida's juvenile justice system beginning in 1987.
In 1994, the school was placed under the management of the newly created Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, which operated the school until its closure in 2011. By this time, the school had facilities to house 135 inmates. Many of the boys sent there had been convicted of rape or of committing "lewd acts on other children".
On September 16, 1998, a resident of the school lost his right arm in a washing machine. A lawsuit was filed against the institution, and the plaintiff was awarded an undisclosed amount in 2003.
21st century
In April 2007, the acting superintendent of the school and one other employee were fired following allegations of abuse of inmates. The state officially acknowledged that abuses had taken place there. The White House Boys, a growing group of adult survivors who had been held there in the 1950s and 1960s, were speaking out to the press about conditions and their experiences.In October 2008, several of them attended a state ceremony to install a historic plaque at the now closed White House that acknowledged that brutal past. The news was carried nationwide.
In late 2009, the school failed its annual inspection. Among other problems, the inspection found that the school failed to deal properly with the numerous complaints by the boys held there, including allegations of continued mistreatment by the guards. State Representative Darryl Rouson said the system was struggling to move on from a longstanding "culture of violence and abuse".
The U.S. Department of Justice conducted a survey of 195 US facilities, including the Florida School For Boys. According to its 2010 report, 11.3% of boys surveyed at the school reported that they had been subject to sexual abuse by staff using force in the last twelve months, and 10.3% reported that they had been subject to it without the use of force. 2.2% reported sexual victimization by another inmate. DOJ said these percentages meant the home was deemed to have neither "high" nor "low" rates of sexual victimization compared with the other institutions assessed in the survey.
In July 2010, the state announced its plan to merge Dozier with JJOC, creating a single new facility, the North Florida Youth Development Center, with an open campus and a closed campus. However, the following year, claiming "budgetary limitations", the state decided to close both facilities on June 30, 2011. Remaining students were sent to other juvenile justice facilities around the state.
After Hurricane Michael in 2018, the Jackson County Sheriff's Office was given the property, now known as "Endeavor", to relocate its damaged offices.