Whether you've read Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel or watched Ramell Ross' Best Picture-nominated film, the "Nickel Boys" stays with you. Florida's real-life Dozier reform school shuttered in 2011. Anthropologist Kaniqua Robinson studied its victims and spoke to its survivors.
From sexual abuse and sweatbox torture to beatings and murder, Robinson researched Dozier's 111-year operation, where boys as young as eight were captured and put to forced labor.
"Reform schools" were prison reform – children’s alternatives to adult prisons. But these schools didn't reform them any more than so-called “corrections” facilities "correct" anyone. Charges like truancy and trespassing were justifications to punish children for their real crime: Blackness. To remember Dozier's victims, we must challenge the rationale used to incarcerate them.
For Robinson, interviews of Dozier’s survivors and written archives of its victims foreground their perspectives. The film takes perspective literally, forcing viewers to see only what its protagonists can see. Other moments show archival footage, like Alphonse Bertillon's invention: the modern mugshot. Fingerprinting. Photographed faces. Measurements of hands and ears. The state surveils us, and media commodifies the trauma -- reducing us to objects. Robinson and Ross insist on a counter-narrative.
After the Bertillon montage, protagonist Elwood hears how "graduates" of Nickel Academy get sold to continue working off their "debt." Elwood replies with a question that defies the foundation of the criminal legal system: "Debt from what?"