Report: About 100 boys may have died at now-closed Florida youth prison

[unhappycamper]

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/12/10/177005/report-about-100-boys-may-have.html

Report: About 100 boys may have died at now-closed Florida youth prison
Carol Marbin Miller | The Miami Herald
Posted on Monday, December 10, 2012

MIAMI — About 100 boys may have died between 1900 and the 1970s at a controversial youth prison in the Florida Panhandle, including seven boys who perished after 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 Arthur G. Dozier property in rural Marianna, archaeologists and anthropologists with the University of South Florida are conducting an exhaustive archeological and historical analysis of the site in an effort to locate the burial grounds of scores of children.

In a 114-page report released Monday, researchers concluded that a minimum of 98 children died at Dozier between 1911 and 1973. The largest gravesite 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 did not correspond to the actual interments, and that it was likely that an additional 20 children were buried there.

Dozier, which opened as the Florida State Reform School on Jan. 1, 1900, remained in continuous operation 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.

[Nay]

1. I grew up in FL and I remember this place -- there were all sorts of rumors about it way back

then, and all of the guys I knew were scared of ever having to be sent there. This was in the 60's.

[sylvi]

4. Same here

The name "Marianna" had an almost mystical, dread-filled quality about it. "Getting sent to Marianna" was on a par with being exiled to a Soviet gulag.

Apparently, that wasn't too far from the truth.

[TwilightGardener]

2. Poor kids--I'll bet that was always an awful place,

especially way back in the early 1900's. No one cared about them, and they probably knew it.

[slampoet]

3. And let me guess. No one is getting fired and no one is going to jail over this.