Investigation into child abuse at Marianna reform school brings no charges
By Ben Montgomery, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Friday, March 12, 2010
They have thought about revenge, daydreamed about swinging a leather strap at a feeble old man. Some have even driven back to Marianna, as grown men, with murderous intent.
One way or another, the former wards of the Florida School for Boys want the guard who beat them to pay.
But a 15-month investigation into decades-old abuse won’t result in criminal charges against Troy Tidwell or any other former staffers at the state’s oldest reform school, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said Thursday.
“With the passage of over 50 years,” the 13-page FDLE report states, “no tangible physical evidence was found to either support or refute the allegations of physical or sexual abuse.”
The FDLE interviewed more than 100 men, relatives and former staffers about allegations of brutal beatings in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Most of the statements were consistent, they found. Boys were given up to 100 licks with a heavy leather paddle in a putrid cinder block building called the White House. Many said their backsides bled, that they needed stitches, that they had to pick underwear from their lacerations. Eight said they had scars or suffered injuries.
Three former employees told investigators they either witnessed abuse or saw the effects, such as welts or bloody pajamas. The daughter of one deceased employee told the FDLE that her father came home one night and said, “That damn drunk son of a b—- beat another boy,” in reference to Arthur G. Dozier, after whom the school is now named. Her father later quit in disgust.
One former superintendent, Lenox Williams, told investigators he administered 10 to 12 licks. “That’s the number,” he said. “We didn’t go over that.”
He did recall hearing from a school physician that a boy had “gotten too many licks across his buttocks with that paddle.”
“He said there . . . were some, some lacerations,” Williams continued. “And it’s possible to do that with it if you choose to.”
The few men who claimed to have witnessed deaths at the school could provide few specifics and no names. Some former students said they were sexually abused, but they could not identify their abusers.
The investigators did not interview Tidwell; his attorneys declined their requests.
Forensic investigators did examine the inside of the White House and tested the walls for blood. “All areas tested had negative results.”
The FDLE gave its report to Glenn Hess, state attorney for the 14th Judicial Circuit of Florida. Hess declined to prosecute, citing the statute of limitations and the vague nature of some of the allegations.
The investigation was ordered by Gov. Charlie Crist after a number of men went public in 2008 with stories of abuse. The men, who call themselves the White House Boys, found each other online a few years ago. The school is the subject of a Times investigation, “For Their Own Good.”
Crist also asked the FDLE to investigate a small cemetery on the property. That investigation, concluded last year, found no evidence of foul play in the deaths of 31 boys believed to be buried on school property.
The White House Boys are critical of both reports, saying the FDLE has a conflict in investigating allegations against state employees and state agencies.
Robert Straley, 63, of Clearwater says he was beaten and sexually assaulted by Tidwell, a memory that he repressed for decades. “It seems like such an absolute travesty of justice that a person could do that and get away with it,” Straley said after reading the report.
Straley and more than 300 others are pursuing a claims bill in the Legislature seeking unspecified compensation.
“This isn’t over,” Straley said. “We’re not in it for the money.”
http://www.tampabay.com/news/investigation-into-notorious-marianna-reform-school-brings-no-charges/1079048
The arrest of an Army sergeant (and Iraq veteran) who allegedly waterboarded his 4-year-old daughter for failing to recite the alphabet is sickening. Yet it may be the kind of news we must come to expect if, as a society, the United States determines that torture is an acceptable method of securing information and inducing obedience. Physical abuse of children is nothing new, of course, in certain right-wing quarters, as Max Blumenthal reminded us by exposing the pedagogical sadism of Focus on the Family in Republican Gomorrah.
For a sergeant who tortures his child, however, the relevant model probably comes from somewhere high in the chain of command. At the center of today’s propaganda promoting the torture state are former Vice President Dick Cheney, his family and many of his friends, working through an organization called Keeping America Safe that is run by his daughter Liz Cheney. The financier behind that outfit is one Melvin Sembler, a curious character whose résumé indicates that he is all too familiar with the “enhanced interrogation” of children.
Sembler is best known as a Florida shopping center magnate and Republican fundraiser whose success in amassing funds for the Bush family won him two ambassadorial appointments. Such patronage is a sordid aspect of national politics, but seems trivial when compared with the truly dark side of Sembler’s biography. Long before he achieved prominence in national politics, he was the driving force in the “boot camp” movement that popularized the use of psychological and physical abuse of “troubled” children and teenagers.
His own creation was a federally funded outfit known as Straight, Inc., which eventually fell apart amid multiple lawsuits and accusations of torture by teenagers abused in its secretive facilities.
The best reporting on Straight’s frightening history in recent years has appeared in Reason, the libertarian magazine, under the byline of Maia Szalavitz. Some of the techniques that eventually brought Sembler’s organization to the attention of law enforcement authorities will be eerily familiar to anyone who remembers what happened at Abu Ghraib: humiliating punishments, broken bones, starvation, sleep deprivation, stress positions, verbal assaults, eight-hour sessions of questioning, and so on.
According to Szalavitz, “Straight’s national clinical director … admitted to authorities in 1982 that he had kept teenagers awake for 72-hour periods, put them on peanut butter-only diets, and forced them to crawl through each other’s legs to be hit in a ’spanking machine’ … Straight ultimately paid out millions of dollars in dozens of lawsuits related to abuse and even kidnapping and false imprisonment of adults.”
Eventually Straight crumbled amid those multimillion-dollar settlements, newspaper exposés and government probes, thanks to the activism of Richard Bradbury, a young man whose experience resembles the stories of innocent Iraqis who were caught up in the torture machine over there.
Again according to Szalavitz, Bradbury “was forcibly enrolled in the program in 1983, when he was 17. His sister had had a drug problem, and Straight demanded that he be screened for one as well. After an eight-hour interrogation in a tiny room, Bradbury, who was not an addict, was nonetheless held. He later described beatings and continuous verbal assaults, which for him centered on sexual abuse he’d suffered as a young boy. Staffers and other participants called him a ‘faggot,’ told him he’d led his abusers on, and forced him to admit ‘his part’ in the abuse.”
Of course Sembler, like his pal Cheney, will never admit that anything went wrong with his grisly enterprise. When last heard from, as ambassador to Italy, he still listed his affiliation with Straight on his official State Department profile as a matter of personal pride. Just another exemplar of Cheney family values.
Source: http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2010/02/09/torturedkids/
Thursday, May 23, 2002
By Radley Balko
Samantha Monroe was 12 years old in 1981 when her parents enrolled her in the Sarasota, Fla., branch of Straight Inc., an aggressive drub rehab center for teens.
Barely a teen, Samantha also had no history of drug abuse. But she spent the next two years of her life surviving Straight Inc..
She was beaten, starved and denied toilet privileges for days on end. She describes her “humble pants,” a punishment that forced her to wear the same pants for six weeks at a time. Because she was allowed just one shower a week, the pants often filled with feces, urine and menstrual blood. Often she was confined to her closet for days. She gnawed through her jaw during those “timeout” sessions, hoping she’d bleed to death.
She says that after she was raped by a male counselor, “the wonderful state of Florida paid for and forced me to have an abortion.”
There are hundreds of Straight stories like Samantha’s. Wes Fager enrolled his son in a Springfield, Va., chapter of Straight on the advice of a high school guidance counselor. Fager didn’t see his son again until three months later — after he’d escaped and developed severe mental illness.
Since then, Fager’s set out to clear the air on Straight. He has accumulated stories like Samantha’s and his son’s on a clearinghouse Web site. They are stories of suicides and attempted suicides, rapes, forced abortions, molestations, physical abuse, lawsuits, court testimonies, and extensive documentation of profound psychological abuse at Straight chapters all over the country.
Yet, the Straight model of drug treatment is thriving, with the trend toward “boot camp” style rehab centers growing more and more en vogue and Straight’s founders, high-powered Republican boosters Mel and Betty Sembler, wielding enormous influence over U.S. drug policy.
Mel Sembler is currently serving as President Bush’s ambassador to Italy, and the Semblers serve on the boards of almost every major domestic anti-drug program. They are longtime close associates of the Bush family, and are behind efforts to defeat medicinal marijuana initiatives all over the country. Despite the horrors that have surfaced about Straight’s history, they are proud and unrepentant about the program.
With more and more U.S. states turning to mandatory treatment instead of incarceration for minor drug offenses — with Mel and Betty Sembler continuing to flex political muscle in the power corridors of the drug war — the story of Straight is one worth hearing.
Straight was spun off of a rehab program called The Seed based on the “synanon” method of treatment. Established in 1972, the program lost its funding after a congressional investigation turned up evidence of brainwashing and cult-like mind control tactics. But a Florida congressman named Bill Young persisted. He found advocates in the Semblers and persuaded them to start a similar rehab center in St. Petersburg, which they called ” Straight Incorporated .”
Despite allegations of abuse from escaped members and pending lawsuits, over the next 15 years Straight won laudatory praise in Republican circles. Luminaries from Nancy Reagan to Princess Diana visited Straight branches and touted their successes (though by most estimates only about 25 percent of Straight “clients” ever completed the program).
But Straight’s tactics soon caught up to it in the courts. A college student won a false imprisonment claim of $220,000 in 1983, and another claim cost Straight $721,000 in 1990. A Straight spin-off called Kids of North Jersey lost a $4.5 million claim in 2000. Straight chapters across the country began to shut down, culminating with the last branch in Atlanta closing in 1993.
But the Straight philosophy was far from finished. Many chapters and directors reopened new clinics that employed the same tactics under different names — such as KIDS, Growing Together and SAFE. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush visited and praised SAFE, despite the fact that a Miami television station reported widespread Straight-like abuse at the facility in a 2000 expose.
Amidst mounting lawsuit losses and bad publicity throughout the 1990’s, the umbrella organization Straight Inc. changed its name in 1996 to the Drug Free America Foundation. DFAF thrives today — receiving $400,000 in federal subsidies in 2000 and $320,000 from the Small Business Administration.
“It amazes me that despite the pattern of complaints and abuse allegations, Straight chapters can simply change their names and continue to operate,” says Rick Ross, a cult expert and intervention specialist. Ross says there’s an unfortunate market for “rehab” centers that take burdensome children off the hands of troubled parents.
Most troubling, however, is the considerable and continuing political clout of Straight Inc.’s founders. Former President Bush once shot a television commercial for DFAF, and designated the Semblers’ program as one of his “thousand points of light.”
Long a presence in Florida Republican circles, Mel Sembler was tapped as ambassador to Australia in 1989. Today he serves the younger Bush as ambassador to Italy, and he served on the board of the 2000 Republican National Convention.
Betty Sembler co-chaired Jeb Bush’s campaign committee. In return, the governor declared Aug. 8, 2000, “Betty Sembler Day” in Florida — due, he said, to her work “protecting children from the dangers of drugs.”
She also serves on the board of DARE, the largely failed anti-drug program for elementary school students.
DFAF also worked with then-governor Bush on anti-drug programs in Texas, and today claims to have his ear on national drug policy as well. Indeed, Arizona prosecutor and Sembler favorite Rick Romley was on Bush’s short list for drug czar. Though Romley wasn’t nominated, Bush did tap staunch drug warrior John Walters. The nomination caused Betty Sembler to remark, “…. we have lacked the leadership and support of the White House … until now.”
“It’s really shocking that the Semblers are still lauded and honored after all that’s come out about their organization,” says cult expert Ross, a self-described Republican.
Last year, a reporter from the Canadian e-zine Cannabis News asked Betty Sembler in person about the horror stories he’d read from Straight survivors. “They should get a life,” Sembler replied. “I am proud of everything we have done. There’s nothing to apologize for. The legalizers are the ones who should be apologizing.”
That’s the attitude of the drug war’s power duo, who can be unrepentant about the lives their program destroyed because they believe a win-at-all-costs approach is the only way to remove the scourge of drugs from society. Shattered lives, suicides, forced abortions, fractured psyches — all necessary casualties of the drug war, and nothing to apologize for.
Radley Balko is a writer living in Arlington, Va., and publisher of The Agitator.com.
Source: http://www.webdiva.org/fox/
NEW YORK, Feb. 3 (UPI) — The state of New York is closing a controversial youth detention center where a teenager died in restraints three years ago, child advocates say.
The closing of the Tryon Boys Residential Center follows a Justice Department report alleging the state uses excessive force on youths in its custody, USA Today reported Wednesday.
The closing of Tryon and another youth facility is being attributed to budget restraints.
“One of the great ironies is that the economic crisis may be accomplishing what advocates like me have been saying for 30 years,” says Mark Soler of the Center for Children’s Law and Policy.
Soler says it has become too expensive to lock up children.
It costs $210,000 a year to keep a child in a youth detention center in New York.
Gladys Carrion, the head of New York’s juvenile system, says no one can look at it objectively and conclude that “we are really doing a good job.”
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Source: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/02/03/Youth-prisons-face-economic-pressure/UPI-63601265210515/
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