Dozens of Florida Reform School's Past Residents Later Sentenced to Death

CW: descriptions of abuse in carceral settings

In recent years, hundreds of men have come forward to recount brutal beatings, sexual assaults, deaths and disappearances at the notorious Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in the panhandle town of Marianna, Florida. Nearly 100 boys died between 1900 and 1973 at Dozier, some of them from gunshot wounds or blunt force trauma. Some of the boys’ bodies were shipped back home. Others were buried in unmarked graves that researchers only recently uncovered.

After Florida lawmakers formally apologized for the horrors they endured as children more than 50 years ago, survivors who say they suffered physical or sexual abuse at two state-run reform schools in Florida are in line to receive tens of thousands of dollars in restitution from the state. At its peak in the Jim Crow 1960s, 500 boys were housed at the Dozier School, most of them for minor offenses such as petty theft, truancy or running away from home. Orphaned and abandoned children were also sent to the school, which was open for more than a century.

Bryant Middleton was among those who spoke publicly in 2017, when lawmakers formally acknowledged the abuse. Middleton recalled being beaten six times for infractions that included eating blackberries off a fence and mispronouncing a teacher’s name after being sent to Dozier between 1959 and 1961.

“I’ve seen a lot in my lifetime. A lot of brutality, a lot of horror, a lot of death,” said Middleton, who served more than 20 years in the Army, including combat in Vietnam. “I would rather be sent back into the jungles of Vietnam than to spend one single day at the Florida School for Boys.”

Last week, Michael Bell, 54, was executed for fatally shooting two people outside a Florida bar in 1993. Bell spent four months at the Dozier School for Boys in the mid-1980's  when he was 15. According to Bell, guards at the reform school forced him to fight much larger boys at least six times, taking cash bets from other Dozier employees on whether he would win. They threw him face down on a cot in a squat building everyone called “the white house” and told him to grasp the headrail, while beating him with a leather strap until he bled. They shackled his arms and legs and left him in that position for hours.

Despite several investigations, no one has been charged or prosecuted for abuse at the schools.

In an investigative review from The Marshall Project, Bell was among at least 34 boys who stayed at Dozier and another 16 sent to Okeechobee — a separate boys’ school with a troubled history — who ended up on Florida’s death row. At least 19 others, and possibly many more, went to prison for murder but were not sentenced to death. Twenty-five of them killed when they were 15, 16, 17 or 18 – soon after departing the reform schools. Combined, men who attended Dozier and Okeechobee have killed at least 114 people.

Dr. George Woods is a neuropsychiatry specialist in California who offered expert testimony in the 2010 case of another death row inmate sent to Dozier as a child. Woods said the institution literally beat the humanity out of some boys, whittling away their value for human life. “Dozier helped make these boys killers,” he said.

You can read more at "Dozens of Teens Who Spent Time at Abusive Florida Reform School Ended Up on Death Row" from the Marshall Project. The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system.