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Rumpus Book ClubFlorida’s Torture Chamber for Delinquent Boys
For 109 years, Florida has sent bad boys to the Florida School for Boys–for things like rape and assault, yes, but also for petty infractions like truancy or smoking in the bathroom, or sometimes because the state wanted an easy solution to a kid with no parents. A long overdue spotlight has been directed onto the school, and with horrifying results: it’s revealed FSB to be less a place of reform and more a place of torture. Kids who are now grown men describe being dragged into a small white outbuilding where they were hog-tied and lashed until their backsides were split open and running blood in rivers. The men recall bits of tongue and lip dried on the pillows on the beds in that building. They recall the smell of death, the blood smeared on the walls, and the superintendents (especially the one-armed man) who administered the whippings. What were they told as the leather tore open their flesh? “It’s for your own good.”
May 31st, 2009 at 11:52 am
I was at FSB in 1966/67. It was a horrific place. However, you have mixed things together and exaggerated to the point of non-truth.
We weren’t literally dragged to the whitehouse unless we refused to walk or tried to bolt. During my day, we were ferried there in a car. A dark blue Ford Fairlane with the great seal of the state of Florida on the front door, to be exact.
We were not hogtied and lashed; that isn’t even possible. Hog tieing was a bizzare disciplinary procedure practiced in the very late 60′s after corporal punishment was abolished. It was done in the detention (solitary confinement)center in response to problems there, instead of corporal punishment as would have been the case in my days there.
We were not lashed until our “backside were split open and running rivers of blood.” I can’t speak for the place’s entire existence, but we were indeed savagely beaten and severely bruised. And sometimes we had small areas of our backsides and thighs that were raw like road rash, and they oozed blood.
The truth is bad enough. There’s no need to embelish it.