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serious beating that day and later somehow managed to get word to his family. An enraged Joe Sr. drove up to the Lyman School and challenged the coach and other school administrators to a fight. It was the one time that young Joe was proud to be his father’s son.
    Not only was Barboza forced to fend off sadistic school masters, he also had to defend himself against other young inmates. Young Joe was constantly mocked by older boys for his large head, long arms, and stubby legs. Word of Joe’s fighting prowess on the streets of New Bedford had not traveled with him to the Lyman School. Instead, his young tormentors would have to learn the hard way, both in the ring and in the dormitory. When out from under the watchful eyes of the cottage masters, the children meted out their own justices and injustices against each other in a struggle for power reminiscent of Lord of the Flies . At the Lyman School, a boy was either predator or prey. Weaker children were beaten and molestedby stronger students who, growing into their sexuality, looked upon everything with carnal intent and seething anger. Young Joe took to the role of predator early on. Despite his incarceration, he had been granted a freedom that he had never experienced before. No longer tethered to his mother and manipulated by her to keep the elder Barboza in line, Joe’s only responsibility now was to himself. Once again, Joe tucked his chin to his chest and came out swinging. The only way to become king of this violent teenage jungle was to fight for it—and fight he did. He would later claim to have been involved in more than three hundred brawls during his three terms at Lyman, and bragged to have won them all.
    The goal of the school may have been to reform misguided children, but it sadly had the opposite effect on most. Kids left Lyman with a harder edge, more dangerous than when they had gone in. A classic example was the case of Jesse Pomeroy, who would become the youngest person ever convicted of first-degree murder in the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Jesse had been sent to the state reform school in Westborough in the late 1800s after he had been arrested and found guilty of torturing young boys in his South Boston neighborhood. Pomeroy would strip his young victims, tie them to a post, and lash them with a thick rope while ordering them to recite an obscene version of the Lord’s Prayer. He would then mutilate the faces of his victims with a pocket knife. Like Joe Barboza, Jesse Pomeroy looked different from other boys his age. He had a large head, lumbering frame, and a milky right eye. Pomeroy had gone partially blind after receiving a smallpox vaccination as an infant. Jesse was known to stick needles in the eyes of his victims as retribution against the God who had plagued him with this striking deformity.
    Jesse Pomeroy’s first reign of terror was brief, as his milky, or “marble,” eye, as it was described, was an easily identifiable mark used by police to track him down. Like Barboza, Pomeroy was also sent to reform school at the age of thirteen. But unlike young Joe, Jesse proved to be a good student and a model inmate. Pomeroy himself never broke school rules or acted out in a way to warrant a beating by institution superiors. Most children stayed far away from the disciplinary rooms while their classmates were being punished, but not Jesse. He was drawn to the screams of beating victims and would later ask them to describe to him in vivid detail how they had been flogged. Jesse had always been fascinated by thetorture of innocents. He had twisted the heads off birds as a child and later graduated to assaulting young boys. Through his conversations with those young beating victims at the reform school in Westborough, Jesse had learned new methods with which to apply his fiendish trade.
    Jesse Pomeroy had served sixteen months and still had two years remaining on his sentence when he was discharged from the state reform school