Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood Curtis is about to enroll in Tallahassee’s local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy. In reality, it is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear "out back." The tension between Elwood's ideals and his friend Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.