The teenage boys smiled, they shrugged and they smirked. They spoke without permission or they refused to speak at all.

That's all it took for the boys at the Bay County Sheriff's Office Boot Camp to provoke a swift and painful response from their guards. Even crying and "whimpering" brought harsh discipline.

The scenes were repeated over and over, 180 times over the past three years, at the juvenile boot camp in Panama City, according to Florida Department of Juvenile Justice records obtained by The Miami Herald under the state's public-records law.

In only eight of the 180 instances documented since January 2003 were the teenagers described as hitting guards, fighting with other youths, threatening to escape or trying to harm themselves.

The documents - use-of-force reports written by the guards themselves - show that the overwhelming majority of the youths were subjected to "takedowns, " hammer-fist blows and "knee strikes" for:

• Being unwilling or unable to perform rigorous exercises.
• Exercising without sufficient "motivation."
• Being "insolent" with guards.
• Speaking without permission.
• "Breathing heavily."
• "Tensing" themselves.

Boys were physically "restrained" for furrowing their brows, mumbling or gritting their teeth. On Christmas Day 2004, one boy was disciplined for smiling.

VIOLENT PUNISHMENT KNEES, FISTS, THUMBS USED FOR DISCIPLINE

Their punishments: knees jabbed forcefully into their thighs, hammer-fist punches to the arms, wrist twisting, and being wrestled to the ground. Another common tactic was the use of "pressure points, " in which guards used their thumbs to cause pain by pressing on sensitive areas behind the youths' ears or under their chins.

"I . . . observed offender become still and his breathing become shallow and I felt him tense his right arm. . . . I then applied a knee strike to his left thigh area, " a sergeant wrote after one episode on Feb. 23, 2005.

In many of the cases, the guards used the tactics despite written orders by Department of Juvenile Justice chief Anthony Schembri, who in June 2004 banned the use of physical force except in extreme situations.

TREATMENT CRITICIZED EXPERT FINDS 'PATTERN OF TORTURING CHILDREN'

Juvenile justice experts who reviewed the documents at The Miami Herald's request said the treatment of the youths was unjustifiable.

"What you have there is an administratively approved, systematic pattern of torturing children, " said Ron Davidson, director of mental health policy in the psychiatry department of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who studied the 180 reports. Davidson has reviewed nearly 400 group homes, mental hospitals and juvenile justice facilities for the U.S. Department of Justice, the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services and other agencies.

Waylon Graham, a Panama City attorney for the camp's second-highest-ranking officer, Lt. Charles Helms, defends the actions of the guards, saying they behaved exactly as DJJ and Sheriff's Office administrators expected of them, and never intended to harm the youths in their custody.

"They were tightly supervised, " Graham said. "Everything was videotaped there. There were no rogue drill sergeants out of control. To be blunt, some of those kids showed up at the boot camp mean as hell, after they'd been rejected by alternative programs. This was kind of the end of the line."

A computer analysis of the boot camp use-of-force reports - which were redacted by the state to exclude the youths' names for privacy reasons - shows that all but seven of the 180 incidents were declared "appropriate" by the camp's administrators. Three were found to have been inappropriate, and four were left unresolved.