About100 boys may have died between 1900 and 1960 at a controversial youth prison in the Florida Panhandle, including seven boys who perished following escape attempts, according to a new report that raises troubling questions about the now-shuttered Dozier School for Boys.
As state juvenile justice administrators seek to sell the Dozier property in rural Marianna, researchers with the University of South Florida conducted an exhaustive archeological and historical analysis of the site in an effort to locate the burial grounds of children. In a 114-page report released Monday morning, researchers conclude that a minimum of 98 children died at Dozier between 1911 and 1973.
The largest burial ground is on the north side of the prison camp, next to a garbage dump on what for years was called Dozier’s “colored” section. Though the cemetery holds 31 graves marked with PVC pipe crosses, the report said the markers do not correspond to the actual interments, and it is likely that more than 31 children are buried there.
Dozier, which opened as the Florida State Reform School on Jan. 1, 1900, remained in continuous operations until June 30, 2011, when the state Department of Juvenile Justice shut it down amid a years-long controversy over the physical and sexual abuse of children.
In the fall of 2008, a dozen middle-aged men from throughout the state came forward and said they were raped or mercilessly beaten — or both — at the Marianna campus. The “White House Boys” — as some of the men dubbed themselves after the squat white-washed cottage where they were whipped, sometimes 100 times or more — have since spawned at least two books and a movement to extract some type of compensation from the Florida Legislature.
In October 2008, about a half-dozen of the men returned to Dozier. There, DJJ administrators, along with staff working there at the time, dedicated a plaque outside the building and planted a young crepe myrtle tree alongside the now decrepit White House building. Some of the men sobbed as they toured the inside of the cottage, where they described brutal beatings to a small gathering of reporters.
Records at Dozier that were reviewed by the university show that 54 children people were buried on the school grounds, and 31 were shipped elsewhere for burial. School administrators did not record the burial location for 22 other children.
Prison records suggest administrators may have minimized the number of deaths that occurred there in reports to the state — especially when it came to white children.
Biennial reports to state lawmakers early in the 20th century “often listed fewer deaths than what is listed in the school ledgers,” the report said. In a July 1926 report, for example, the school superintendent told lawmakers that four children had died in 1925 and 1926 — all of them black youths. But school ledgers showed six children had died during that time, including two white boys.
One of the boys whose death was not listed in 1926 was a child named Thomas Curry, a white boy who, a death certificate says, died of blunt trauma to his head. Records said Curry died away from the prison campus after he escaped.
Records suggest boys who escaped from the North Florida prison often met a violent death: two boys who escaped died of blunt trauma, and two died of gunshot wounds to the head or chest. Two children died in collisions involving cars; one was listed as having been “run over by [an] automobile.”
Even in death, the black children at Dozier received unequal treatment: African-American children were three times more likely to be buried in an unspecified location than were their white peers, the report said.
