past florida torture

[David]

Figures the news would only come from an overseas paper.  The US news may not be censored, but they have been whipped into obediance. 
The story is an old 'reform' school for boys. 
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24784164-2703,00.html

[Pat K]

 

Damn.

[KBCraig]

The Union Leader ran a story and column just this past week, about some pretty severe treatment meted out to residents of the "youth training school", back when.

Can't find it right now, though.

[error]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/12/09/reform.school.graves/

[dalebert]

Reminds me of this movie.

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3733455129/

[error]

I found this in plenty of U.S. news sources, David.

[David]

Opps, I followed a link from Strike the Root, I ASSumed too much.   

[KBCraig]

I found the UL article (column, actually) that I mentioned earlier.

http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?articleId=645164a6-974f-4fee-99b8-2a9409827efb



John Clayton: Cruel treatment revealed in 1930

Monday, Dec. 8, 2008

TOO BAD THE Marquis de Sade is dead. Same goes for Torquemada and Dr. Josef Mengele.

They all loved to inflict pain on others.

They would have loved today's column.

It started taking shape two weeks ago when I wrote that faithful reader Gary Wall -- who has spent a lifetime as a child advocate in New Hampshire -- was hoping to put together a book on the 150-year history of the institution now known as the John H. Sununu Youth Services Center.

That's the fancy new name for the place that we locals still refer to as the State Industrial School or the Youth Development Center.

In the century-and-a-half since it was first opened -- on land once owned by Gen. John Stark, incidentally -- the YDC has been of immense benefit to thousands of troubled and wayward youngsters who might otherwise have been confined under far harsher circumstances.

That having been said, in an effort to help Gary find material for his book, I stumbled upon a vintage YDC scandal that makes prison films such as "Midnight Express" and "The Shawshank Redemption" look like "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."

It started quietly enough on July 22, 1930, when the old Manchester Leader carried the following headline:

"Milford Man Not Again Named As School Trustee."

In the story that followed, readers learned that then-Gov. Charles W. Tobey refused to reappoint a Milford man, Charles E. Emerson, to his post as chairman of the State Industrial School's board of trustees.

The next day, when Emerson publicly complained that he was being dropped from the board for reasons of partisan politics, Gov. Tobey responded by dropping a bombshell on Charles Emerson and on the people of New Hampshire.

Using terms and specifics that left no room for misinterpretation -- precisely the kind of language you would never see used today -- Gov. Tobey accused Emerson of presiding over an institution where "punitive methods savored of barbarism and the dark ages."

Even as other YDC trustees tried to rally public support for Emerson (with former Manchester Mayor George Trudel among them), Gov. Tobey pre-empted any posturing by issuing an explicitly detailed report based upon his unannounced visits to the school.

Among his charges, Gov. Tobey claimed that YDC disciplinary measures included:

"Whippings: Girls in the adolescent period have been laid on a bed or made to lie across a large laundry basket and had physical punishment administered on their naked flesh by application of lashes from a piece of rubber piping with a wooden handle on one end, to the extent of from 100 to 250 strokes.

"In some cases," the report added, "so many strokes were given that one attendant had to relieve another in applying the strokes."

Next came the so-called "Water Cure."

"This was administered," according to the governor, "by placing the girl in a shower bath compartment, stripped naked except for bloomers. The cold shower overhead is turned on and a common garden hose is used to play cold water from a nearby faucet full force upon the naked body, the hose being held but a few feet from the girl.

"By testimony of the attendant who usually applies this punishment," he added, "she plays it in the girl's face to 'sort of strangle them.'"

Did somebody say Abu Ghraib?

And if the girls tried to shield their faces?

"Testimony was given that when a girl put up her hands to ward off the force of the water from her face, a strap was applied to her back to make her take her hands down."

Which bring us to "The Dungeon Treatment."

"Girls have been confined in two compartments, each about six-by-eight feet in size," the report stated. "They look like shed-roof hen houses ... built against the wall of a rather dark attic of the boys' building."

Wait. It gets worse.

"The only air that can get in comes indirectly through a space covered by chicken wire," the governor's report claimed. "One cannot see his hand in front of him when inside.

"There is no furniture except a blanket and a pail in a corner," it stated. "Girls have been kept in these dungeons for as long as two weeks, being allowed out each morning to empty their buckets downstairs, and then locked up again until the next morning."

Mindful of the fact that the trustees might be unaware of such measures, the governor brought some of them in to bear witness.

"I took the trustees upstairs to see them," the governor said, referring to the dungeons, "and found that none of them had ever seen them before. I took two of them in one of the compartments and closed the door. One remarked that he would commit suicide if he were contained in one."

You couldn't get away with that at Gitmo, yet it was happening to kids here in Manchester.

And if you dared to run away from the school?

"Clipping the hair of both boys and girls who run away from the institution" was the norm.

Emerson and his fellow trustees still denied that such events could have occurred on their watch, but their denials were undercut when the Industrial School's superintendent, one James M. George, actually posed for a picture in the Manchester Leader in which he smilingly displayed the rubber hose.

The back-and-forth bickering continued to play out in the newspaper.

Emerson ultimately called for a public hearing into the governor's allegations, but the state's Board of Public Welfare denied his request on the grounds that "the reported punishments inflicted upon the girls have been stopped, and this board does not consider it is authorized or justified in investigating a condition which no longer exists."

That prompted this sad headline: "Emerson, Denied Public Hearing, Leaves Case in Public Hands."

I forwarded all of my material to Gary Wall.

His e-mail is gary@wallville.com

Should he choose to write a book about the history of the YDC, this will be an ugly chapter indeed.

[Pat K]

Just sickening.

[error]

We have a kinder, gentler tyranny now.