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home. Gone were the familiar sights and sounds of his New Bedford neighborhood. Gone was the familiar aroma of Palmeda’s ethnic Portuguese dishes wafting through their apartment from her tiny kitchen. The choked streets and exotic smells he was accustomed to were now replaced by acre after acre of rolling farmland. It was as much like home to Barboza as the craters of the moon. Many of the students were just like him, kids who had committed petty crimes, rather than violent offenses. Some had been sent to Lyman for being truant from school, or even for the sheer audacity of being a “stubborn child.”
    Young Joe and the other boys were housed in cottages with pleasant names such as Sunset, Hillside, Wachusett, Elms, and Oak. From the outside, Lyman appeared no different from a prep school that might cater to the sons of blue-blooded masters of industry. The inside told a different story, however. The children were given a strict religious education and taught a trade, such as carpentry, masonry, or plumbing. These so-called benefits were overshadowed by the harsh disciplinary doctrine of the institution. With extreme prejudice, beatings were handed out daily by cottage masters wielding a variety of weapons, including belts and even pick handles. Children who committed even minor infractions were marched down to Oak Cottage (the disciplinary cottage) and given brutal “attitude adjustments.” Barboza received countless beatings, including one particularly savage punishment called “the hot foot,” whereby a cottage master would strike repeated blows to the arch of a child’s naked foot.
    There were no walls or wired fences to keep the inmates on the grounds. Instead, fear of reprisal gave potential runaways enough of an incentive to stay put. Those students who did manage to escape were never talked about or heard from again. Rumors were spread among the children, and perhaps even encouraged by the adults, that runaways were killed and their bodies buried in the black waters of a nearby swamp. As frightening as those rumors were, they were not bad enough to dissuade Barboza from running away. He simply walked away from the facility one day and spent two weeks on the run. His parents were harassed daily by New Bedford police officers, all of whom believed they were withholding information on the boy’s whereabouts. In reality, Joe’s brief stint as a teenage fugitive was as much a mystery to his family as it was to the cops.One night young Joe turned up at his parent’s apartment wearing a big smile and an engineer’s hat with the visor turned up. When asked by his mother where he had been for the last two weeks, Joe explained that he had found work selling vegetables from a cart on the street. His parents did not immediately call police as they had been instructed to do; instead they drove Joe back to the Lyman School themselves the next day. Joe Sr. and Palmeda handed Joe back over to school administrators with the promise that he would never escape again. As his parents got into their car for the long journey home, Joe was marched down to Oak Cottage for another “attitude adjustment.”
    Hating—yet also wanting to emulate—his father, young Joe picked up the sport of boxing while a student at Lyman. Joe’s prowess in the ring both astonished and annoyed his schoolmasters, who had not forgiven him for his escape. The school’s boxing coach put Joe in the ring with an older student with the aim of teaching the young punk from New Bedford a painful lesson. Joe mauled his opponent from the opening bell, hitting him with a series of savage shots. The boy crumbled to the gym floor wincing in pain and admitting defeat. Joe unlaced his gloves and strode by the boxing coach with a toothy grin plastered on his long face. The frustrated coach followed Barboza into the locker room and attacked him while he was untying his shoes. The coach threw a powerful uppercut that connected with the boy’s jaw. Young Joe took a