Speaker 1: School of Humans. Please note that this episode discusses physical
Speaker 1: and sexual abuse, and another note, lots of the audio
Speaker 1: in this episode is from thirty year old deposition hearings.
Speaker 1: The rest was recorded from phone calls with someone incarcerated,
Speaker 1: so warning that parts of this are a little hard
Speaker 1: to hear. In nineteen seventy nine, in Los Angeles, two men,
Speaker 1: Jesse James Andrews and Charles Sanders, stood at the door
Speaker 1: of Preston Wheeler's apartment. Preston was home with his girlfriend,
Speaker 1: Patrice Brandon, and when they saw the two men outside,
Speaker 1: they invited them in. They weren't expecting trouble. After all. Preston,
Speaker 1: a small time drug dealer, and Jesse were friendly, but
Speaker 1: Jesse and Charles were not there as friends. According to Charles,
Speaker 1: Jesse tie Preston and Patrese up while the two of
Speaker 1: them ransacked the apartment looking for money and drugs and valuables.
Speaker 1: When they didn't find anything worthwhile, Jesse raped and strangled
Speaker 1: Patrese to death with a hanger before sodomizing and murdering Preston.
Speaker 1: A neighbor, Ronald Chisholm, having heard a commotion, went to
Speaker 1: make sure that Preston was okay. Charles later testified that
Speaker 1: Jesse invited and rattled in and then strangled him in
Speaker 1: the bathtub. Jesse and Charles went about a year before
Speaker 1: being caught. Charles was arrested first and agreed to testify
Speaker 1: against Jesse in exchange for a reduced sentence. Jesse was
Speaker 1: ultimately arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. You hear
Speaker 1: about a crime like this and you think, how could
Speaker 1: someone do this? What is it about them that would
Speaker 1: make them do something this brutal, cruel, this evil. The
Speaker 1: answer requires us to go back fifteen years before that
Speaker 1: triple murder, back to nineteen sixty four when Jesse James Andrews,
Speaker 1: aged thirteen, was sent to Mount Meg's. When I first
Speaker 1: got the email about Mount Megs, I was horrified by
Speaker 1: the story and what the kids went through. But there
Speaker 1: was one particular part that stuck with me that made
Speaker 1: me feel like I had to tell the story. Not
Speaker 1: what Mount Megs did to children, but how it changed
Speaker 1: the trajectory of those children's lives once they became adults.
Speaker 1: We've told you the stories of some of them. Jenny Knox,
Speaker 1: Mary Stevens, Johnny Bodley and Lonnie Holly. We've told you
Speaker 1: about how they came to Mount Megs scared and alone,
Speaker 1: how they learned to adopt, how they suffered. So it
Speaker 1: may sound strange to say this, but in many anyways, Jenny, Mary,
Speaker 1: Johnny and Lonnie were the lucky ones, lucky despite the
Speaker 1: fact that they're still haunted by what happened to them,
Speaker 1: even though they're now in their sixties and seventies. But
Speaker 1: many people who were incarcerated at Mount Meg's as children
Speaker 1: ended up spending their entire lives tethered to the criminal
Speaker 1: legal system. Many were sentenced to life in prison. Many
Speaker 1: others were sentenced to death. I'm Josie Duffie Rice and
Speaker 1: this is Unreformed The Story of the Alabama Industrial School
Speaker 1: for Negro Children, Episode seven, The Aftermath. Jesse James Andrews
Speaker 1: went to trial and was sentenced to death via gas
Speaker 1: chamber in nineteen eighty four, but a few years later
Speaker 1: he appealed, arguing that his attorneys hadn't presented mitigating evidence.
Speaker 1: When a defendant is facing a possible death sentence, they're
Speaker 1: allowed to present evidence that could convince the jury that
Speaker 1: a life sentence would be more appropriate. The evidence could
Speaker 1: include many things developmental delays, remorse age, or childhood trauma.
Speaker 1: Jesse wanted to tell the court about Mount Megs for
Speaker 1: his appeal. Jesse's lawyers wanted to talk to others who
Speaker 1: knew Jesse when he was at Mountmegs. In total, thirty
Speaker 1: two former Mountmegs students sat for depositions. Every single one
Speaker 1: of them had spent significant time in adult prison. The
Speaker 1: day nineteen, Could you say your name again to the record, please,
Speaker 1: Johnny McNiel, Richard Everley, Junior, Holiver Clifton Weekly, Vernon Madison,
Speaker 1: Testing rain Row of Young Bolish Founcer and mister Raines.
Speaker 1: You're presently incarcerated or in custody at the Alabama prison system.
Speaker 1: That's right. Um. Could you tell me where you were
Speaker 1: raised or practice in Threal. I've been about twenty seven
Speaker 1: twenty year, you know, Mount Megan. Yeah, it's been thirty
Speaker 1: years since those depositions. We reached out to all the
Speaker 1: people who were deposed who are still living, most of
Speaker 1: whom are still in prison. We only heard back from
Speaker 1: one person. This is a prepaid collect call from an
Speaker 1: incarcerated individual at Alabama Department of Correction. Miscall is not private.
Speaker 1: It will be recorded and maybe monitored. You may start
Speaker 1: the conversation now, OK, my man is Johnny Mack. This
Speaker 1: is Johnny Mack Young. Not to be confused with Johnny Bodley,
Speaker 1: who you've also heard from today. Johnny Mack is seventy three.
Speaker 1: He's at the Saint Clair Correctional Facility in Springvale, Alabama.
Speaker 1: Johnny Mack's life parallels Jesse's in many ways. They come
Speaker 1: from the same part of Alabama. As children, they were
Speaker 1: both sent to Mount Meg's and as adults both were
Speaker 1: sentenced to prison for murder. Well one of the most
Speaker 1: violent persons that you would ever have met in your life,
Speaker 1: and those characteristics wols in steel in me when I
Speaker 1: was a tweer of thirteen year child in my mayor's
Speaker 1: reformatur Johnny Mack was born in a small town called Pritchard, Alabama.
Speaker 1: Pritchard was very segregated. Johnny Max says he didn't even
Speaker 1: meet a white person until he was seven. Like many
Speaker 1: of the other survivors we've heard from, Johnny Mack was
Speaker 1: one of several siblings, but he was closest to his
Speaker 1: older sister Rose and his brother James. Rose will go
Speaker 1: to school where she came home. She pulls us learned
Speaker 1: how to write. She pulls us loud and leave with
Speaker 1: Rose's help. Johnny Mack was pretty good at school. He
Speaker 1: liked reading and math, but by age twelve, he was
Speaker 1: starting to get into trouble. He'd rather life would have
Speaker 1: been a whole lot too, But instead of listening to
Speaker 1: his sister, Johnny Max says, he started running in the streets.
Speaker 1: He kept running away from home and playing hooky from
Speaker 1: school until eventually he was declared incorrigible and sent to
Speaker 1: Mount Meg's. He got there around the same time as Lonnie,
Speaker 1: and his stories about his time there echoed the ones
Speaker 1: we heard from everyone else. Like the physical violence right
Speaker 1: then there was a sexual violence. They will out of
Speaker 1: being forced to work in the fields from dawn to
Speaker 1: dusk were so long curved and the earth that the
Speaker 1: role was dropping out Barry mister Glover's beating stick, which
Speaker 1: Glover named John Henry think John John even attempting to
Speaker 1: run away multiple times. After attempting to escape six times,
Speaker 1: Johnny Mac stopped running away once he discovered the consequences.
Speaker 1: Johnny Mack was an ike that was slang for the
Speaker 1: tough guys. He says that at Mount Meg's you had
Speaker 1: to be on guard all of the time. You can
Speaker 1: trust you hey, a friend better. On April fifth, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, the day after Martin Luther King was killed,
Speaker 1: Robert Kennedy gave a speech called on the Mindless Menace
Speaker 1: of Violence, where he talked about the cowardice of the
Speaker 1: bullet like the one that had ended King's life and
Speaker 1: would end his own just two months later. But he
Speaker 1: mentioned another kind of violence too, which he called quote
Speaker 1: slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or
Speaker 1: the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions,
Speaker 1: in difference and in action and slow decay. This is
Speaker 1: the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between
Speaker 1: men because their skin has different colors. It was the
Speaker 1: institutional violence at Mount Meg's that led to the harm
Speaker 1: that many of its former residents would later commit. And
Speaker 1: this is part of the legacy of Mount Meg's too,
Speaker 1: what the institution did to those children even when they
Speaker 1: weren't children anymore, people like Johnny mack Young and Jesse
Speaker 1: James Andrews. In nineteen sixty four, a new student arrived
Speaker 1: at Mount Meg's, a kid named Jesse James Andrews, the
Speaker 1: same Jesse who twenty years later would be sentenced to
Speaker 1: death for triple homicide. Johnny Mack took notice of him
Speaker 1: since the two boys were from the same area in Alabama.
Speaker 1: The first thing that stood out about Jesse is that
Speaker 1: he was small. Johnny Mack described him as passive, soft
Speaker 1: week new arrivals were always subject to some hazing, but
Speaker 1: it was worse for the ones they called scrubs, kids
Speaker 1: like Jesse, the guys who were easily preyed upon. The
Speaker 1: ones Johnny Body described as suckers, guys like that, the
Speaker 1: vulnerable ones. They stood out like sore thumbs at Mount
Speaker 1: Meg's vulnerability put a target on your back, and right
Speaker 1: away Jesse caught their attention. Even years later, the other
Speaker 1: kids remembered how much more abuse he endured than most
Speaker 1: From what you observed during the time when you and
Speaker 1: Jesse were both at Mount may With Jesse treated any
Speaker 1: better than any of the other kids there, And my
Speaker 1: old thing, I would say he was treating a little
Speaker 1: bit worse because of his side, you know. Like for
Speaker 1: me knowing Jesse and looking at him, I had to say,
Speaker 1: you know, he has a great feminine look about himself.
Speaker 1: So I said, hey, you're going to have a hard time.
Speaker 1: You remember actually seeing mister Blobard hit Jesse with the Bullwin? Yes?
Speaker 1: Did you ever see Jesse hit at the morning Ben? Yes,
Speaker 1: I've seen me. Jesse was assaulted and tortured, not just
Speaker 1: by the staff but by other kids. He was a
Speaker 1: laughing stock, a frequent punching bag, and an even more
Speaker 1: frequent rape victim. Johnny Max says that he and some
Speaker 1: others taught Jesse how to fight, but the way they
Speaker 1: did that was by beating him themselves. Well, one of
Speaker 1: the things that we did was we like passed on
Speaker 1: the rules and you know, like a code of conduct,
Speaker 1: teach them how to survive. Okay, what was the code
Speaker 1: of conduct? But you don't let nobody or do nothing
Speaker 1: you to get away? And you didn't. I will show
Speaker 1: funds of Weaknessess. Johnny Mack and Jesse were released from
Speaker 1: Mount Meg's in the mid nineteen sixties. They'd crossed paths
Speaker 1: many years later under very different circumstances, but as kids
Speaker 1: leaving Mount Megs thrown out to fend for themselves, they'd
Speaker 1: had a certain mentality instilled in them. Hurt them before
Speaker 1: they hurt. You, trust nobody, and never show weakness. At
Speaker 1: age fifteen, Johnny Mack was released from Mount Meg's. He
Speaker 1: found himself with no money and no help, and he
Speaker 1: ended up in a small town where he broke into
Speaker 1: a grocery store. That's how wind up going to jail.
Speaker 1: Just a month after he left Mount Meg's, Johnny Mack
Speaker 1: was locked up once again. This time he was sent
Speaker 1: to the adult jail. I'm fifteen years old. For me,
Speaker 1: godja would be grown ay. They all big and swoll
Speaker 1: up because he's pushing up. And back then there were
Speaker 1: often kids in adult correctional facilities, and that's still the
Speaker 1: case today. This is one of the many unimaginable elements
Speaker 1: of our criminal justice system, shoving children into adult prisons
Speaker 1: and jails to fend for themselves. Given his years at
Speaker 1: Mount Meg's, some of the most brutal parts of jail
Speaker 1: were familiar to Johnny Mack. He told us a story
Speaker 1: about time when he beat an older inmate with a
Speaker 1: metal lunch tray. I need him wait to knocked him down.
Speaker 1: Johnny Mack went to trial for this assault. He was
Speaker 1: convicted and sentenced to three years and at Moore prison,
Speaker 1: a notoriously terrible adult penitentiary in Alabama. Jesse James Andrews
Speaker 1: was also sent to Atmore. That triple homicide that Jesse committed.
Speaker 1: It turns out it wasn't his first time being charged
Speaker 1: with murder. Just three months after he left Mount Meg's,
Speaker 1: in the wake of the abuse and torture, he was
Speaker 1: implicated in another killing, though he didn't pull the trigger.
Speaker 1: He was only fifteen years old. Johnny Mack got out
Speaker 1: of Atmore at eighteen and moved up North. Over the
Speaker 1: next several years, he was in and out of various
Speaker 1: correctional facilities in different states across the country. In New Jersey,
Speaker 1: he was charged with multiple counts of assault and robbery.
Speaker 1: He also has a record in Ohio. But Johnny Mack
Speaker 1: even said in those depositions from the nineties that Mount
Speaker 1: Meg's was worse than any prison he went to as
Speaker 1: an adult. What would you say the level of violence
Speaker 1: was The man made to Fanny at the prodeo time
Speaker 1: Aunt made was rougher than the prison Instachusetts. He had
Speaker 1: to be tough, you know. The event that brought him
Speaker 1: back home to Alabama was a theft gone wrong in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties, Johnny Mack was living in New Jersey
Speaker 1: and started robbing local drug dealers with a woman named Candy.
Speaker 1: One night, the people Candy and Johnny Mack planned to
Speaker 1: rob had been tipped off that they were coming. A
Speaker 1: shootout ensued. My girl Candy, Yeah, the hardback shotgune. Johnny
Speaker 1: Mack hid behind a couch and Candy came in the
Speaker 1: back door with her automatic shotgun. She gave cover for
Speaker 1: Johnny Mac to grab the drugs in cash and run
Speaker 1: out the back. He was grazed with a bullet on
Speaker 1: his way out. Candy ran out the front and straight
Speaker 1: into the police, who arrested her and hauled her off
Speaker 1: to jail, but Johnny Mack escaped and he fled back
Speaker 1: home to Alabama. When Johnny Matt got to Alabama, he
Speaker 1: ended up back near Pritchard in Mobile County, where he
Speaker 1: was born. After a failing drove a lot of the
Speaker 1: still right. He had a whole drug operation run out
Speaker 1: of two buildings hidden away outside Mobile. He was making
Speaker 1: good money and in a way he was settling down.
Speaker 1: He started dating a woman who had kids and they
Speaker 1: all moved in together in a house up on a
Speaker 1: hill in a community called eight Mile, Johnny Mack was
Speaker 1: stepping in as a father figure. Were warm fall that
Speaker 1: it treats me. He loved them as if they were
Speaker 1: his own, he said, especially the youngest daughter, who he'd
Speaker 1: take a round with him everywhere. He started boxing when
Speaker 1: he lived in New Jersey, so he'd take her to
Speaker 1: the gym with him or out whenever he was running
Speaker 1: errands for the home. But Johnny Mack was still hustling
Speaker 1: selling drugs, still had that Mount Meg's mentality instilled in him.
Speaker 1: Then he met another woman, one much younger than him.
Speaker 1: She was in an altercation with a guy who worked
Speaker 1: with Johnny Mack's operation. She ended up shooting at the guy,
Speaker 1: and when he tried to retaliate, Johnny Mack stepped in
Speaker 1: and knocked him out. Johnny Mack was impressed by this
Speaker 1: woman's zeal. He described her as a gangster. So even
Speaker 1: though he had his family on the hill, he started
Speaker 1: seeing this new woman too. But soon after Johnny Mack
Speaker 1: discovered she was stealing money from him, money that he
Speaker 1: says he needed to support his family. You can't take
Speaker 1: him out by you're taking money on my baby's mouth.
Speaker 1: He was furious. According to Johnny Mack. He told her
Speaker 1: she'd better not come around him anymore, but he says
Speaker 1: she stole from him one more time. Flash, Jane, Babe
Speaker 1: stole my money. I killed him. The Alabama Department of
Speaker 1: Corrections classification summary for Johnny Mac reads Sean and killed
Speaker 1: female victim who was two months pregnant. Johnny Mack was
Speaker 1: in his thirties when he was convicted. He's been in
Speaker 1: prison for thirty six years. He is serving a life
Speaker 1: sentence without the possibility of parole, which means he will
Speaker 1: die in a place where he has spent most of
Speaker 1: his life. In Alabama prison. Johnny Mack Young was sentenced
Speaker 1: to life without parole in nineteen eighty six. By the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen nineties, he had escaped from prisons in Alabama
Speaker 1: several times and had racked up dozens of serious disciplinarian fractions.
Speaker 1: When I came to Bridge, that's the ad that moms vititude.
Speaker 1: That's when Johnny Mack heard that Jesse had committed three
Speaker 1: murders in California. The story he heard was slightly different
Speaker 1: than what's in the legal documents. He heard that Jesse
Speaker 1: was with two other guys, not just Charles I Elina
Speaker 1: lomeboy was that MoMA the California killed somebody. The kinner
Speaker 1: was so henious molded to homeboy running out of the
Speaker 1: building and left him in there. And he had told
Speaker 1: him and he wounded up getting no give room. Johnny
Speaker 1: Mack remembered just how much violence Jesse had been forced
Speaker 1: to endure, so he and another prisoner who knew Jesse
Speaker 1: wrote to Jesse's lawyers. You write the lawyers to Gil
Speaker 1: the Voynu everything on the belief, and then we told
Speaker 1: him about Mamay. Now, Johnny Mack wasn't writing the lawyers
Speaker 1: solely out of the goodness of his heart. He told
Speaker 1: us that he was hoping that Jesse's lawyers would bring
Speaker 1: him out to California for an official statement. He thought
Speaker 1: they'd give him plenty of opportunities to escape to secure
Speaker 1: his runaway plan. Johnny Mack was trying to be as
Speaker 1: helpful as possible to Jesse's lawyers, even finding more inmates
Speaker 1: for them to talk to. We gave him too many
Speaker 1: a day. But unfortunately for Johnny Mack, Jesse's lawyers found
Speaker 1: so many former Mountmeg students incarcerated in the Alabama prison
Speaker 1: system alone that instead of bringing everyone to California, the
Speaker 1: lawyers decided to come south. They talked to those thirty
Speaker 1: two in mates and prisons around Alabama, at facilities like Kilby,
Speaker 1: Saint Clair, Donaldson, Elmore, and Holman where people on death
Speaker 1: row are imprisoned. How would you describe the effect that
Speaker 1: Mountain Max had our youth? But I tell you one
Speaker 1: that was a lot of fear, but a lot of
Speaker 1: hit me man with the wold. They've had me messed
Speaker 1: up as a chip on my shoulder and put so
Speaker 1: much anger and hate inside of you until when giving
Speaker 1: a chance, it's like saying, all of a sudden you
Speaker 1: run through the woods and you was the rabbit. The
Speaker 1: next thing you knew, you come up in your warf
Speaker 1: So you want to hunt you some rabbits too, you know?
Speaker 1: Hear me with a lot of hate. Couldn't help them,
Speaker 1: but they hate Wait the way they treat you, and
Speaker 1: we were we was being treated worth the dull man
Speaker 1: and everybody, the most most of y'all that I was, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I made him me brially most everybody you knew a
Speaker 1: Mountain Matthew later, so PRIs yesself? Would you say that
Speaker 1: you're experiencing had anything to do with your convictions for
Speaker 1: blas later in mine. Yeah, gave me the foundation for
Speaker 1: everything that I am, all that I am proud of me,
Speaker 1: all that I would always be a proud of tomou me.
Speaker 1: There's no question that Jesse did something unspeakably horrible when
Speaker 1: he killed Preston Wheeler, Patrice Brandon, and Ronald Chisholm. And
Speaker 1: yet if there was ever legitimate mitigating evidence, his time
Speaker 1: at Mount Meg's would seem to qualify. And if his
Speaker 1: experience wasn't enough, thirty two other people testified under oath
Speaker 1: about what they had gone through, how it changed them,
Speaker 1: and what they had seen Jesse indoor, but the court
Speaker 1: wasn't convinced. In two thousand and two, the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: of California upheld Jesse's death row sentence. It wasn't until
Speaker 1: a subsequent appeal into thousand and nine that the court
Speaker 1: recognized the traumatic impact of what Jesse had endured. His
Speaker 1: death sentence was overturned and he was resentenced to life
Speaker 1: without parole. Jesse James Andrews is still alive today after
Speaker 1: years in the infamous San Quentin Prison in California. He
Speaker 1: is now at the California healthcare facility, which houses many
Speaker 1: elderly incarcerated people with chronic health conditions. We reached out
Speaker 1: to him and as lawyers, but we didn't hear back.
Speaker 1: Jesse and Johnny Mack aren't the only former Mount Meg's
Speaker 1: kids to be convicted of murder. There's Sam Howard, Kevin Hawker,
Speaker 1: who's Roosevelt young Blood, once the longest serving prisoner in Alabama.
Speaker 1: There are men who left Mount Meg's and committed murder
Speaker 1: within months when they were still just kids. There are
Speaker 1: people whose names were keeping private because they're still appealing
Speaker 1: their sentences. And there are hundreds more people who endured
Speaker 1: so much cruelty at Mount Meg's as children and then
Speaker 1: inflicted serious violent harm on others once they got out.
Speaker 1: They went to an institution where violence was a constant
Speaker 1: eat or be eaten, where they were being abused, being
Speaker 1: forced to abuse others, or both. And Mount meg they
Speaker 1: teach you how to be a better thief, a better killer,
Speaker 1: or better rapists. Mount means turn gas into murderers. That's
Speaker 1: the other Johnny, Johnny body. When I get out of
Speaker 1: Mount Meg, I had a killing mentality. If someone did
Speaker 1: anything to me, I would have killed you. That's attitude
Speaker 1: I left me, And if things had gone just a
Speaker 1: little differently, he too could have easily ended up on
Speaker 1: death row or serving a life sentence. He told us
Speaker 1: about one moment when he was living in Boston where
Speaker 1: he could see just how much the violence and abuse
Speaker 1: at Mountain Meg's had affected him. I was in Boston,
Speaker 1: you know, and I went into this store. So I
Speaker 1: went into the dress room with this big baggy pair
Speaker 1: of pans on and I put about three or four
Speaker 1: pay onto the baggy pair and thee and I attempted
Speaker 1: to walk out. So when I walked out the door
Speaker 1: and alarm went off. And so when the alarm went off,
Speaker 1: I started winning, and this white guys started chasing me.
Speaker 1: The white guy had to call me. I would have
Speaker 1: killed him. Johnny told us that almost all of his
Speaker 1: friends for Mountain Meg's are now either dead or in prison.
Speaker 1: Jenny's former crush, the Boy on the Tractor, is currently
Speaker 1: on death row in Alabama. In the almost forty years
Speaker 1: he's been locked up, Johnny Mack has encountered dozens of
Speaker 1: former Mount Meg's kids within the prison walls. Everybody that
Speaker 1: was in Mountain Bay's with me. Yeah, the kid death
Speaker 1: Row is filmot state. When the old guy in COMMANI
Speaker 1: didn't rape somebody and didn't accute the least one you
Speaker 1: fet the behavior came home weird. I keep thinking about something,
Speaker 1: Superintendent EB Holloway said in nineteen seventy, right before he retired.
Speaker 1: This was three months after a federal court ordered Mount
Speaker 1: Meg's to implement reforms, and just one day after US
Speaker 1: Attorney Ira Dement told a local paper that he was
Speaker 1: considering prosecuting Holloway for child abuse. Holloway said that when
Speaker 1: he came to work at Mount Meg's twenty three years before,
Speaker 1: they didn't send him to teachers, of therapists or social
Speaker 1: workers to learn about child welfare. Instead, he said, they
Speaker 1: sent me to Kilby. Kilby, by the Way, is one
Speaker 1: of the worst adult prisons in Alabama. Holloway continued, I
Speaker 1: had to do what they wanted done. If I hadn't,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have been here twenty three years. The question
Speaker 1: they always asked was how many bales of cotton have
Speaker 1: you made? And never how many children have you helped.
Speaker 1: It's tempting to think of Mount Meg's as the failure
Speaker 1: of cruel individuals. Holloway Fiddy Matthews and countless others. But
Speaker 1: the truth is that the failure was much bigger than that.
Speaker 1: It's the thing Robert Kennedy was talking about the violence
Speaker 1: of institutions, institutions that not only inflicted violence, but instilled it.
Speaker 1: Why would the conditions of these institutions make a first
Speaker 1: class criminal because one is influenced by his environment. That
Speaker 1: second voice is Ira Dement, the lawyer turned prosecutor turned
Speaker 1: judge who represented Denny and the kids from Mount Meg's
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixty nine lawsuit. Ira died in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, but he was also deposed in the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen nineties for Jesse James Andrews appeal. Do you think,
Speaker 1: based on your knowledge of the superio institutions, that someone
Speaker 1: subjected to those conditions can be influenced in absolutely? Totally.
Speaker 1: You know. I'll give you a perfect example. I have
Speaker 1: one hundred and ten pound rott Willer. He's a gentle job.
Speaker 1: You could take the same dog being a puppy and
Speaker 1: turn him into a ferocious, vicious dog. So I am
Speaker 1: totally sold on the proposition how you trade someone greatly
Speaker 1: influences his or her behavior. My friend Rachel said something
Speaker 1: similar that people who go on to inflict some of
Speaker 1: the worst harms almost always had serious trauma in their childhoods.
Speaker 1: You may remember her from episode one. She and I
Speaker 1: went to law school together, and now she lives in Montgomery,
Speaker 1: where she's worked with both people serving life sentences for
Speaker 1: crimes they committed as juveniles and people on death Row.
Speaker 1: Early on, I called her to talk about Mount Meg's
Speaker 1: I asked her about her clients, many of whom have
Speaker 1: been accused of committing serious violent harm. How often is
Speaker 1: that they experienced childhood trauma? Would you say in your experience?
Speaker 1: I mean, it sounds too neat, but every single time, absolutely,
Speaker 1: one for one. I sort of end up looking at
Speaker 1: people the arc of people's lives retrospectively and kind of
Speaker 1: studying and coming to understand how they ended up on
Speaker 1: a place like death Row, how they ended up sort
Speaker 1: of being the most cast off of all people in
Speaker 1: our society. And so, you know, I noticed a lot
Speaker 1: of patterns, and one of them is this contact with
Speaker 1: the juvenile justice system. And Rachel said something I hadn't
Speaker 1: really thought about, that many of the kids at Mount
Speaker 1: Meg must have felt betrayed. I think every single one
Speaker 1: of my clients was arrested as a juvenile, has some
Speaker 1: deep wound that they're nursing about the way that they
Speaker 1: feel misled or they felt attacked, where they felt abandoned
Speaker 1: by the law and by fingers of authority, And that
Speaker 1: is just something that I can't imagine them ever really
Speaker 1: forgetting or recovering from. But I also just see how
Speaker 1: that level of the trail could just sort of completely
Speaker 1: realign your understanding the world. I now know in my
Speaker 1: heart that nobody does something violent or abusive unless it
Speaker 1: is something that has been shown to them or that
Speaker 1: they've been subjected to. Whatever they've been accused of or
Speaker 1: whatever they've perpetuated is an expression of something that they've
Speaker 1: made through. Some of the tragedy of Mount Meg's is scientific.
Speaker 1: We know a lot more now about how abuse affects
Speaker 1: the brain and the harmful effect of trauma on children.
Speaker 1: We know that our brains aren't fully developed until our
Speaker 1: mid twenties. We know about the negative impact exposure to
Speaker 1: violence can have on young kids. The kids who were
Speaker 1: sent to Mount Megs were victimized by the institution, but
Speaker 1: they weren't the only victims. Preston and Patrese and Ronald
Speaker 1: were also victims of Mount Megs. The pregnant woman Johnny
Speaker 1: mac Shot was a victim of Mount Megs. And it's
Speaker 1: not just them, but their families and their loved ones
Speaker 1: who paid the price for the harm that the school inflicted.
Speaker 1: In other words, Mount Meg's harmed more than just the kids.
Speaker 1: It harmed those who those kids went on to hurt.
Speaker 1: So much lost time, so much grief, so much unrealized
Speaker 1: love and joy. When I started researching Mount Megs, I
Speaker 1: told an acquaintance about the institution and what it did
Speaker 1: to children. He shrugged, looked, unfhazed. It's hard to control
Speaker 1: violent kids. He told me. They were violent kids, weren't they?
Speaker 1: Why else would they have been there to begin with.
Speaker 1: His argument was that Mount Meg's didn't shape these kids,
Speaker 1: They shaped Mount Meg's. I thought about that conversation when
Speaker 1: I found this document from the nineteen fifties about a
Speaker 1: report that J. R. Wingfield, the former superintendent, sent to
Speaker 1: the governor. In it, he said that lots of the
Speaker 1: kids at Mount Meg's were there for laziness and loitering.
Speaker 1: The people we've talked to went in for similar things,
Speaker 1: things like truancy or being out past curfew or petty
Speaker 1: theft or running away. Many went in for the crime
Speaker 1: of having no parents and nowhere else to go. Jesse
Speaker 1: James Andrews went in for joy riding. Look, even if
Speaker 1: these kids had shown some inclination for violence, even if
Speaker 1: they had committed very serious crimes, Mount Meg's would still
Speaker 1: have been a terrible place to send them. What all
Speaker 1: kids need is guidance, safety and help. No child or
Speaker 1: person is rehabilitated by being stuck in a factory of abuse.
Speaker 1: These kids weren't monsters. They were shaped by what they endured,
Speaker 1: what they were forced to see, and that's what makes
Speaker 1: the history of this institution even more devastating. In the
Speaker 1: next episode, the last of this series, we're going to
Speaker 1: look at how former students like Johnny mac still cope
Speaker 1: with their experience and what's become of Mount Meg's today. Unreformed,
Speaker 1: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children
Speaker 1: is a production of School of Humans and iHeartMedia. This
Speaker 1: episode was written by me Josie Deffie, Rice and Taylor
Speaker 1: von Laslie. Our scoop supervisors Florence Burrow Adams, and our
Speaker 1: producer is Gabby Watts, who had additional writing and production
Speaker 1: support from Sherry Scott. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley,
Speaker 1: Brandon Barr, Mett Arnette, and me. Sound design and mix
Speaker 1: is by Jesse Niswanger. Music is by Ben Soli. Additional
Speaker 1: recordings are courtesy of the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture.
Speaker 1: Special things to the Alabama Department of Archives and History,
Speaker 1: Michael Harriet, Floyd Hall, Kevin Nutt, Van Newkirk, and all
Speaker 1: of the survivors of Mount Meg's willing to share their stories.
Speaker 1: If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating
Speaker 1: and review wherever you get your podcasts. If you are
Speaker 1: someone you know attended Mount Megs and would like to
Speaker 1: be in contact, please email mountmes podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: That's mt M e i g S Podcast at gmail
Speaker 1: dot com. School of Humans