Detailing a remarkable school-to-death-row pipeline in Florida

Recent decades has brought considerable concerns about so-called “school-to-prison” pipelines, a term meant to lament certain educational policies and practices that serve to enhance the prosepcts of some students being caught up in criminal justice systems. But this new Marhsall Project article take this story to a new level by documenting what seems to be a school-to-death-row pipeline in Florida. Here is the article’s full headline: “Dozens of Teens Who Spent Time at Abusive Florida Reform School Ended Up on Death Row: Michael Bell, set to be executed Tuesday, is among at least 34 boys from the Dozier School later sentenced to death. Did abuse make them more violent?”. I recommend the full piece, and here is how it gets started:

Eight years before a jury sentenced him to death for two murders and he confessed to three more, Michael Bell spent time at a Florida reform school so violent that the state later apologized for the abuse and paid millions to the victims.  The now 54-year-old Bell, who is scheduled to be executed on Tuesday, spent four chaotic months at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna during 1986 and 1987 when he was 15.

Guards forced him to fight much larger boys at least six times, he said, 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.

Bell is 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, according to a review by The Marshall Project.  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.

Most people who are tormented in childhood do not become murderers, and it can be difficult to know why someone commits violence, experts say.  Some boys who went to Dozier likely would have committed murders regardless of the trauma they suffered at the reform school.  But research shows that childhood and adolescent abuse does affect brain development and can make people more violent.

Bell and other men sent to Dozier around the same time described to The Marshall Project a culture of fear, a foreboding that escalated at night when older boys stole in through the windows and beat up or sexually abused younger ones.

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.