The Nickel Boys

In the 1960s, Elwood is college-bound until he makes a mistake that lands him at a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose staff profess to shape inmates into upstanding young men but who routinely deliver vicious beatings and sexual abuse and make sure resisters disappear forever. The shocked Elwood takes Martin Luther King's pacifist approach to events, but friend Turner has other ideas. Whitehead researched the Florida Industrial School for Boys (later the Dozier Academy), where a secret mass grave was found after its 2011 closure.