Marianna is about 80 miles from my hometown & in the late 50s & maybe early 60s I remember our family going to the "Florida Boys School" to see the Christmas decorations. The residents worked year-round to build elaborate displays through which there was a driving tour. What happens behind the closed gates of such a facility can be very different from the public image.
I doubt Florida is the only state where there was abuse in institutions. However, just 25 miles east of Marianna is the state mental hospital in Chattahoochee. There was a book & 1989 movie "Chattahoochee", about horrific mistreatment of patients who were caged, unclothed & unwashed, just occasionally hosed down by firehoses.... worse conditions than anyone would tolerate for animals.
Isn't it frightening how inhumane people can be? It's too late for those in charge to be made accountable.... most are dead. Financial compensation to former residents can do little to repay their scarred lives now, but I think having the abuse exposed will validate their pain & help them to move forward.
Sad, sad, sad!
The same whispers have always been said about our state hospital too NoZ in Reidsville, Georgia.
I dated a deputy sheriff back in the late 60s and he had to take a mental patient to Reidsville and he asked me if I wanted to ride along so I did. I have never been so sad but terrified as I was of that place at the time. He told me that the guards/staff would beat them to a bloody pulp if they acted up.
As we passed by the women's unit I could see some of the women hanging out the second story window taking their clothes off throwing them on the lawn and talking all sorts of sexual babble. He said the staff would lock these kind up for months at a time in isolation. No wonder they were mentally ill and never left there until they died.
And the man we took up there never said one word the entire time we traveled to get there. I was so young then I didn't realize the importance of it all but it haunts me how they were so mistreated for something they couldn't help. I think a lot of them weren't even mentally ill and the families just wanted to get rid of them.
I don't understand why it is too late for charges to be filed. Aren't there one or two still living today? Isn't the one armed man one of those still alive? A lot of the boys seem to remember him and how brutal he was.
We have seen cases even recently where those in their 80s are being brought to justice for murders they got away with for decades. Some have even been in wheelchairs. And when was the last death there that is known? I don't think this just happened during a certain era and then stopped. For so long nothing or anyone was stopping them from doing whatever they wanted to do to these children. I also wonder if they ever used the excuse that some had run away from the reform school and never were caught but might actually be among the dead there.
What these men did is so unforgivable. They used their power and violent/sexual urges against these boys they were suppose to reform into good men. They knew no one would care about these kids and they took full advantage of that and avoided justice. That is just so wrong on every level of human decency.
I remember as a teen being curious of this place as we passed by it. I knew it was suppose to house over a hundred boys or more that were seen as unruly but the one thing that always stuck out to me is how eerily quiet it was every time we passed by as if the boys there were too afraid to make noise and be kids.
