How Could You? Hall of Shame-Green River Boys Camp and Woodsbend Boys Camp

This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.

From Kentucky,”even now, one image still haunts Eddie Taylor from his time 40 years ago at a Kentucky boys camp for juvenile offenders: He and other boys are holding down another boy, forcing him to scrub oil spots off the parking lot until he wears the bristles off the brush and the skin off his fingers.

“I’ll be at work, and this stuff will come into my head, and I’ll be in tears,” said Taylor, 56, of North Carolina, who said he has “flashbacks” of the boy’s blood mixed with swirling water and cleanser on the asphalt. “It was brutal. It was awful.”

Now Taylor and other former residents of Kentucky’s boys camps are reconnecting — largely through social media — in hopes of finding relief from disturbing memories that they have been unable to forget: beatings at the hands of other kids, harsh punishments, constant fear.

“As you get older and wiser, a lot of these things can come up from the past and bite you,” said Taylor, who said he was sent to Green River Boys Camp in Butler County at 17 for stealing hubcaps. “You become very vulnerable.”

Former residents recall a prison camp environment where friendships were forbidden, all mail was inspected and the slightest infraction — a smile or laugh — could trigger a brutal round of abuse by other boys in a notorious form of punishment called “grouping.”

In those sessions, which could last for hours, boys were ordered to surround another youth in their group and then shove him, shout at him and spit on him. The fracas would often degenerate into kicking and punching the victim.

Residents say staff or even other boys could call a grouping session that they say was used to instill fear in the boys and control them.

“It always ended up with someone getting the living hell beaten out of them,” said Steve Chambers, 55, of Michigan, who was sent to Woodsbend Boys Camp in Morgan County in 1979 at age 15 for theft.

Abuses in the system of about a dozen state-run camps were well-documented through a series of investigations and outside commissions dating to the early 1970s.

Two deaths of boys, one in 1972 from an alleged beating and the other in 1983 from heart failure, were tied to grouping despite repeated efforts by state officials over the years to ban the practice that became embedded in the culture of some of the camps.

Ray Fraley, 53, of Louisa, Kentucky, said he still has nightmares about his 1979 stint at Green River.

And David Jahn, 58, a sales manager in Tampa, Florida, said he was surprised when troubling memories resurfaced of his 1976 stay at Woodsbend.

“About a year ago, I started thinking about what happened to me as a kid,” said Jahn, who was sent to camp for stealing a car after running away from abusive foster care in Florida. “All of a sudden, I started thinking about the stuff we went through there. I wondered whatever happened to these people.”

Now, he and others are finding out largely through Facebook and have formed a network they hope will help them work through experiences they say still echo through their adult lives. Several said they had no idea others were suffering the same mental torment until they found each other online, prompting phone calls, shared stories on Facebook and some personal visits.

“I started realizing I wasn’t the only victim of this,” said Price Capps, 54, who was sent to Green River in 1976 at age 13 for truancy and running away. “There are others, and they are still around.”

They want their stories told about abuse they say was never fully detailed, inflicted in the name of rehabilitation. Most of the camps were isolated, in rural communities where boys were cut off from family and friends.

“There was nobody to help you,” Capps said. “I was terrified. I was just a little kid.”

Some of them want compensation — or at least some official acknowledgment — for what they experienced, though they admit it’s unlikely decades later with a system that no longer exists and former administrators who are retired or dead.

“All these guys from all these camps, we can’t tell you how much we want justice,” said Kirk Daniel, 55, of Romulus, Michigan, who launched a Facebook page called Victims of Kentucky Boys Camps that is helping connect former camp residents.

Most of all, they want peace.

“I’m hoping that it will put some of our minds at ease that we were not the only ones,” said Capps, who now lives in New Hampshire.

But finding peace will be hard for Daniel, who said he’s still angry about the conditions he endured after he was sent to Woodsbend in 1979  at age 17 for car theft. He was released in 1980.

“I have stayed in a rage over this,” Daniel said. “I am sorry but after 37 years, I’m still pissed off!”

No one is seeking to justify wrongdoing that got them committed to boys camps, Daniel said.

“It’s wrong to steal somebody’s stuff,” he said. “But I shouldn’t have been tortured.”

Suffering for years

Jerry Cantrell, who worked at Woodsbend in the early 1970s, said he’s been in touch with some of the men, including Daniel, and understands how troubled they are.

“They’ve obviously suffered for many years,” said Cantrell, who left Woodsbend in 1977, eventually spending his career with a private children’s agency. “I’d like to see them get some kind of outcome that will satisfy them.”

Cantrell said grouping and other mistreatment of youths was a persistent problem at Woodsbend when he worked there from 1971 through 1977.

“I’d seen some things go on while I was there that was kind of brutal, that shouldn’t have gone on,” he said.

Worst, he said was the 1972 death of Dennis Buttry, a 17-year-old from Berea who was fatally injured during a “grouping” session at Woodsbend.

Cantrell, then a young youth worker, said he walked in on boys and staff trying to revive the unconscious teen and immediately realized that Buttry, bleeding badly from a gash on the head, needed medical help.

“They were screaming at him for faking it,” Cantrell said. “I said, ‘This fella’s in bad shape. You need to get him to a hospital.'”

Walter Chapleau, who was the staff leader of the group when Buttry died, declined to comment for this article.

“That was a long time ago,” said Chapleau, 71, who later served as superintendent at Woodsbend and is now retired. “I don’t care to get into it. It was a pretty bad experience for all of us.”

Though no one was ever convicted in Buttry’s death, the case triggered a wave of outside scrutiny that lasted several decades as problems persisted at the camps.

In 1983, a second youth, Dominic Owens, 14, of Louisville, died after he was held down by other youths in a “grouping” incident at a state boys center in Elizabethtown. Heart failure was determined the cause of death, but a medical expert cited as a factor stress from grouping — supposedly banned after Buttry’s death.

Owens’ judge, former Jefferson County juvenile court Judge Richard FitzGerald, remains furious about the death of a boy who had been committed for only minor offenses such as petty theft.

“Five years after the (state) for the third time had told the court they would not use grouping for control, Dominic was grouped on, had a heart attack and lay brain dead in a hospital,” FitzGerald, now retired, said in an email.

No one was prosecuted over the death.

Abusive conditions were documented by at least three outside commissions appointed to investigate the boys camps between 1972 and 1994, some noting that reforms recommended from previous investigations had never taken hold.

Woodsbend, in Eastern Kentucky, and Green River, in Western Kentucky, were among the camps cited for the most serious problems. But problems were identified at most of the other centers, including one that served girls in Morehead.

Despite repeated efforts to reform the system, problems persisted until the U.S. Justice Department’s office of civil rights stepped in with enforcement in the mid-1990s that triggered sweeping reforms.

The boys camps, run by state social service agencies, were replaced in the late 1990s with a modern system of youth treatment centers under a new state Department of Juvenile Justice created by the Kentucky General Assembly in 1996 as part of reform efforts.

Earl Dunlap, a juvenile justice expert who served as a monitor for the federal government to oversee the reforms, said he has no doubt about accounts of harsh treatment by former boys camp residents. And he is not surprised they remain troubled by the experience.

“It’s no telling the damage that was done to kids back in the day,” said Dunlap, now retired and living in Illinois. “Absolutely no telling at all. It was a matter of survival.”

Group sessions, meant to be a form of counseling for boys to discuss problems, degenerated into brutal “grouping” under poorly trained, insufficient staff, Dunlap said.

“It developed into a hazing process,” he said. “There were a lot of kids who suffered the consequences of that.”

The outside investigations and dozens of news articles from the early 1970s into the 1990s outlined repeated abuses that included grouping and bizarre punishments, such as boys being forced for hours to carry armloads of wood or scrub oil spots off asphalt — often bent over in a torturous position with knees locked in place and hands on scrub brushes on the pavement.

“I scrubbed the skin off my knuckles,” said Todd Big, 53, of  Kenton County,  who said he was subjected to the punishment during 19 months at Woodsbend in the early 1980s. “I was bleeding pretty good.”

And former residents say they were forced to work long hours cutting logs with cross-cut saws, chopping wood, digging out stumps, hauling and loading rocks from creek beds and cutting and hauling tobacco on private farms owned by camp staff or their friends.

Some former residents say they got minimal pay for such work, around 30 cents a day; others say they got nothing.

“They worked us like horses,” said Big, sent to Woodsbend in 1980 after he was caught riding a stolen motorcycle. “All summer long we would bale hay, stack, cut and plant tobacco, cut trees down. Truckload after truckload of trees.”

Charlie Conn, 52, of Valley Station, said he lives with debilitating back and leg damage from serious injuries he suffered in 1981 at age 17 when he was struck on the head by a falling tree and knocked unconscious while on a logging job with other youths at Woodsbend. 

He still has medical records that show he was admitted to the Appalachian Regional Hospital in Morgan County for injuries including a concussion.

“I’m going to look for some compensation — if it’s even possible,” Conn said. “I feel like they owe me because I was injured and they didn’t take care of me.”

Big said he was on the logging job with Conn when a  large tree fell on the group, knocking down the other boys and striking Conn on the head.

“I thought it had killed him,” he said.

In 1981, a state official determined that boys at Woodsbend had been forced to work outside the camp for little or no pay and ordered an end to the practice she compared to “slave labor,” according to a Courier-Journal story.

Living with fear

Former residents — many who said they were sent there for relatively minor offenses such as theft or being out of their parents’ control — told the Courier-Journal they have lived with depression, anxiety, fear and anger they trace to their time at the camps.

“All those things happened to every guy in there,” said Conn, who started his own Facebook page, Survivors of Kentucky Boys Camps, about his experiences. “I’m a pretty tough guy and it still breaks me down.”

Big, a construction worker, said he’s never gotten over his time at Woodsbend.

“I still ain’t right because of that place,” Big said. “They messed my head up in a lot of ways.”

Cantrell, the former worker, said the state then had no system for classifying and treating youths. As a result, teens charged with skipping school or theft — including Buttry, the boy who died — would be placed alongside more violent youths, Cantrell said.

“They really didn’t have any system to determine who needed to be there,” he said. “Buttry should have never been at that camp.”

And without enough youth workers, some staff used the groups as a way to maintain control with youths providing enforcement, Cantrell said.

“It set up a situation where a  lot of kids got abused,” he said.

Most youths came from poor families, or parents separated by divorce and hardship and had little contact with them.

“There weren’t a lot of wealthy kids in boys camps — if any,” Taylor said. “Most of us were from low-income homes, broken families.”

And family visits were strictly monitored. Jahn said he remembers camp residents being warned before weekends when family members were allowed to visit.

“I remember everybody being told, ‘We’re watching you. Make sure you tell them you’re getting help,'” he said.

Daniel said he was too terrified to tell his parents what he was experiencing. After he was released and he described conditions at Woodsbend, his father asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?” Daniel said.

“I said if you would have tried to do anything, they might have killed me,” Daniel said.

Jahn said he recalls the sheer terror of daily life at Woodsbend.

“We woke up scared, and we went to bed scared,” he said. “The fear that you lived with, it was constant fear.”

Taylor is convinced he and many others have never escaped that fear.

“We were scared kids for the rest of our lives,” he said.

Finding survivors

Former residents say they are still working to find other “survivors,” believing hundreds of youth would have passed through the camps over several decades.

They say they have contacted several dozen so far through the Facebook sites,

Daniel has traveled to states including Arizona, Kentucky, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina to meet with men who contacted him online about the boys camps. He said he has talked with them for hours as memories and emotions poured out.

One was Fraley after Daniel traveled to Eastern Kentucky to meet him.

“It’s kind of nice to talk to someone that knows and understands,” said Fraley,  who was sent to a boys camp at 15 after he was involved in a gunfight that erupted during a feud among local families. “Unless you went through it, you don’t know.”

Some, including Daniel and Capps, went on to spend time in prison as adults; others cite alcoholism, drug abuse, joblessness, divorce and failed marriages and relationships. They wonder if conditions they endured in the boys camps are a factor.

Danny Edward “Eddie” Taylor suffered mental and physical abuse while serving time as a juvenile in Kentucky Boys Camps in the 1970s. Sept. 5, 2017

“A lot of us have asked ourselves that,” said Taylor, who works as a musician, songwriter and cabinetmaker outside Raleigh, North Carolina. “What would our lives have turned out to have been if these things hadn’t happened?”

Capps, who was in and out of boys camps until he turned 18 and served time in prison as an adult, said that question is always in his thoughts.

“It’s something that never leaves you,” he said. “I ask myself every day what would my life have been like, what chances would I have had if I’d been taught the right way?””
Survivors of boys camps haunted by brutal beatings: ‘I was terrified. I was just a little kid.’

[Courier-Journal 10/19/17 by Deborah Yetter]

REFORM Puzzle Piece