Roger Caron

Roger "Mad Dog" Caron (born April 12, 1938 in Cornwall, Ontario) is a Canadian bank robber and the author of the influential 1978 prison memoir Go-Boy! Memories of a Life Behind Bars. At the time of publishing, Caron was thirty-nine years old and had spent twenty-three years in prison.

Biography

Roger Caron was born to impoverished parents Donat and Yvonne in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada in 1938. During his first weeks of infancy Caron couldn't keep food down and was constantly gasping for breath, which subsequently led him to being rushed to the local hospital on a few occasions. Though no definitive diagnosis was given for his breathlessness, Caron grew up "very edgy about anything affecting ^* breathing." To this day he cannot swim or hold his head under a shower for too long because of it. Caron was a quiet and secretive child who liked to keep to himself and pass the time by taking apart clocks.

His sister Suzanne was born in 1939 and kid brother Gaston followed in 1944. His father Donat, being twenty years older than Yvonne, had children from a previous marriage, Caron's half brothers and sisters, who by this time were off fighting in World War II. The family lived in an old run-down converted barn that would vibrate when a nearby train passed, rattling dishes and moving beds while the family slept. Caron's mother, Yvonne, was compulsively clean and kept the antique furniture in the house shining.

Caron was "spooked" easily as a young child. With their house full of religious articles and the dishes rattling and bed shaking caused by the train, Caron felt ghosts were haunting him. Up until the age of eight, he was plagued by horrifying nightmares that would leave him physically ill. He would imagine shadowy apparitions coming through the bars of his bed to choke him or large waves that would crash over him making it impossible to breathe. Later, a parish priest was able to help Caron fend off his nightmares. He (Caron) told the priest he had accidentally broke the hand off a large Saint Joseph statue in his house while playing, thinking Saint Joseph's vengful spirit was choking him in the night. The priest had him pray to the life-size Saint Joseph statue at the church where the Father explained to the saint that the boy was only young and didn't know better. He gave Caron a silver medallion to wear around his neck and said Saint Joseph would be his protector from now on. Caron's nightmares disappeared and he continued to wear the medallion through adulthood.

During the final years of World War II, Caron's father found it difficult to feed the family and turned to bootlegging as a source for income. In the beginning it was a small scale operation, but it soon grew to a level where Donat would have to rent parking for his customers and find hiding places to stash the surplus booze. The family's house was raided numerous times by the local police until Caron's father struck a deal with a local cop who would warn them when a raid was coming for twenty-five dollars a week. When a tip was phoned in, the family would rush outside and hide all the bottles in the empty field next to their house and the police were left empty-handed. Donat would chuckle at having outwitted the law once again all while young Caron sat by observing everything, wondering what was "right" and what was "wrong."

Around age eleven, Caron began having altercations with his father's drunken "customers." In one instance, a man killed his pet rooster claiming it was an accident. Caron flew into a rage and he had to be physically pulled off the man. His father beat him severely. Beatings from his alcoholic father and fighting between his parents became more common as the bootlegging business continued to grow. Donat would later give up drinking and bootlegging after realizing the damage that was being done to the family.

Caron cites this time when he began feeling like he was a bad seed. He felt a tremendous drive to do something shocking. People in the community would pass scorn on Caron but, not wanting them to see they were emotionally scarring him, he would laugh it off and run away and do something bad. His older step-brothers would hold him down while his father mercilessly whipped Caron when he got into trouble. The whippings had little effect on Caron and he would find other ways to punish himself like punching a shed door until his knuckles bled.

Caron's first brush with the law came at age twelve. He and a gang of youths broke into a boxcar with the intention of stealing canned goods. The police arrived and Caron made a daring escape, darting between an arresting officer's legs. One of the other youths gave up Caron's name and a motorcycle cop arrived at his school and arrested him in front of his class. The class waved goodbye as he rode away, a passenger in the motorcycle's sidecar, remarking how he "felt like ^* Dillinger". At the court appearance, Caron was let off with probation and a stern lecture by the judge.

By age fourteen Caron had become more of a loner and had a hair-trigger temper that would get him into trouble on a regular basis. He would appear quiet and easy going on the surface but would launch into a full blown rage if pushed. At fifteen, Caron had built a lengthy arrest record topped off by stealing the town's cache of Dominion Day fireworks and three kegs of gunpowder with two other boys. At age sixteen on September 8, 1954, Caron tripped the alarm at a sporting goods store. The police caught him after he hit his head on a beam in an alley and fell while escaping. On October 17 Caron was driven to the Ontario Reformatory in Guelph, Ontario with other future inmates on a bus dubbed the "Black Maria." His memoir Go-Boy! documents the next twenty-three years of his life.

Go-Boy!

Go-Boy! details Caron's life growing up in reformatories, prisons, and mental institutions from the age of sixteen through his thirties. Originally sent to the Ontario Reformatory in Guelph as a teenager for breaking and entering, his "career" in prison grew exponentially after constant bad judgements and a personal inner rage that Caron seemed unable to stifle.

As a teen still in Guelph, Caron was fortunate enough to earn a transfer to the medium security reformatory in Brampton, Ontario. His luck didn't last as he had the misfortune of crossing a bigger inmate which culminated in him smashing said inmate in the neck with a hockey stick during a recreation period. Thinking the inmate was deceased (he was actually only unconscious), Caron hid the body under a boxing ring out of sight of the guards. Knowing he would face serious jail time, possibly hanging, for murdering someone rather than the original fourteen months he was scheduled to be incarcerated, Caron made the decision to escape as soon as possible.

While they were being marched from the recreation center, Caron and a handfull of inmates made a break for the woods at the fringes of the Brampton reformatory amid cries of "Go-Boy!" from fellow convicts. Go-Boy is a prison yell used when an inmate (or inmates) break from a work detail or crew in an attempt to escape. Caron successfully eluded the stalking prison guards and fled, not fully aware of how bleak his life would become over the following decades. He was recaptured three days later and sent back to the Ontario Reformatory in Guelph, this time as a member of the general population (gen pop).

Caron successfully broke out of thirteen prisons and jails, more than any other criminal in Canadian history, exploits he covers in vivid detail throughout the book. Go-Boy! was awarded the 1978 Governor General's Award for non-fiction and was widely acknowledged for its insights into prison life.

Corporal punishment

Go-Boy! covered in graphic detail how prisoners were subjected to corporal punishment by being whipped with paddles designed to inflict physical scarring and maximum pain. Caron was paddled on two occasions with a quarter-inch thick paddle while strapped into a device he described as "a mass of metal tubing contoured to embrace a human form and, affixed to it, shackles and restraining straps" (an old photo of the device taken from the front page of the Toronto Telegram newspaper on February 14, 1956 can be seen here and a computer-generated update here). The paddle had tiny holes drilled through it that were designed to rip the flesh off a prisoners hide with each stroke.

Excerpt from Go-Boy!:

The eerie ritual began when the dozen witnesses ominously scraped the soles of their shoes on the floor in unison, deliberately done to confuse my sense of direction.

"ONE!" I clenched my teeth and my body went rigid as the strap sliced through the air, 'CRACK!' Like a pistol shot, it made solid contact with my buttocks, my head snapped backwards, while violently driving my shackled body forward. White searing pain exploded throughout my being and blood gushed from my lips as I struggled to stifle a scream. It was brutal and it was horrible. My whole body vibrated like a band of tempered steel and my mind filled with nightmares as I awaited the next blow.

"Two!" swish, crack! "Three!" swish, crack! "Four!" swish, crack! "Five!" swish-crack!

Over and over again I heard the scraping of the shoes, the sharp command, the long seconds, the strap cutting through the air, the explosion and then the crazy-out-of-this-world pain that struck terror into my very soul. Finally it was all over. Ten strokes of the paddle and I didn't scream or beg as so many did. That was very, very important to me.

Caron suffered grotesque scarring on his buttocks and lower back as a result of the paddling. The head guard in charge of Caron's bull gang in Guelph, Seargent Tracy, was so infuriated by the damage to Caron's body from one whipping that he personally threatened the medical officer in charge of supervising the punishment with physical violence if he ever witnessed another inmate treated in such a manner again.

Bingo!

Seven years after publishing Go-Boy!, Caron released Bingo! The Horrifying Eyewitness Account of a Prison Riot about the 1971 Kingston Penitentiary riot. Originally part of Go-Boy!, Caron pieced together outtakes from the memoir, including a lengthy section about the Kingston riot, to tell the tale as a separate story. The book narrates the most violent prison riot in Canadian history at the one of the oldest prisons in the country from the perspective of Caron, himself an inmate at Kingston during the riot.

Jojo

Published in 1988, Jojo was Caron's first attempt at writing fiction. In this novel, a half-breed Indian by the name of Lloyd Stonechild begins his life on a reserve in Western Manitoba and grows up to be strong, handsome, and ominously quiet. After one bad decision after another leads him to prison in Kansas he undertakes a harrowing and daring escape to Canada. Unlike Caron's first two books, Jojo was not well-received by critics who panned its lack of character depth.

Where he is today

On April 1, 1992, Caron robbed a Zellers department store in Ottawa. High on cocaine and visibly shaking from the effects of Parkinson's disease, he tried to flee on a city bus only to be caught minutes later by police. Caron was denied bail and held until his trial in 1993. While awaiting trial, Caron tried to escape no less than three times. Initially sent to the Royal Ottawa Hospital to undergo a thirty-day competency test, he tried to pry open the wire mesh covering a window and was immediately sent back to the Ottawa Detention Centre.

Later, Caron was sent to the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital for another attempt at a competency test. He again tried to escape through a window but was caught and placed in a padded cell. When orderlies came to administer Caron's Parkinson's medication, he fought with the staff and tried to make another break.

In autumn 1993, after a lengthy trial, Caron was sentenced to nearly eight years for the Zellers robbery. An extra nine months were added to the sentence because of the previous year's escape attempts, and a further nine months were added for an attempted escape at Gatineau Maximum Security Detention Centre in Hull, Quebec from over a decade earlier, bringing Caron's total sentence to nine years and three months. On July 15, 1994, while imprisoned at the Joyceville Institution, Caron married Barbara Prince, a legal secretary from Ottawa he had been dating prior to his latest incarceration. He also suffered two heart attacks and underwent open heart surgery on December 2, 1998 to have a triple bypass performed. Caron was paroled on December 10, 1998, partially due to his health, and moved to Barry's Bay, Ontario to be closer to his new wife's family. His parole was to last until 2003.

On October 12, 2001, police, acting on an anonymous phone tip, arrested Caron at the Rideau Center in downtown Ottawa for allegedly carrying a loaded revolver, wig, scarf, several hats, and a change of clothes [http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20011014/ctvnews816520/20011014/. In February 2004, he was sentenced to twenty months in prison for being in possession of a loaded .32-calibre semi-automatic pistol at the Ottawa mall, which was a violation of his parole. While in prison for the parole violation, Caron was charged with fifteen more robberies that occurred in Toronto during the summer of 2001. Fourteen banks and one grocery store were robbed. Witnesses thought the robber was over six feet tall and in his thirties. Caron stands five foot eight inches tall and would have been sixty-three years old in 2001. The number of robberies was reduced from fifteen to five and on March 3, 2005 Caron was found not guilty on all charges.

At sixty-seven years old, Caron was released from Maplehurst Corrections Centre in April 2005 and has been living as a free man in Barry's Bay with his wife, Barbara, ever since.

Adaptations

In September 2004, Canadian film company Paradox Pictures secured the rights to Go-Boy! and began work on a screenplay. The following month, Paradox entered a pitch competition at the Raindance Film Festival. Go-Boy! was pitched to a panel of judges that included Neil Jordan and the producer from Bend It Like Beckham, and came in first runner up out of twenty-nine other submissions ^*.

Awards

1978 Governor General's Award (English non-fiction) for Go-Boy! Memories of a Life Behind Bars

Bibliography

1978 Go-Boy! Memories of a Life Behind Bars, Hushion House, 292 pages, ISBN 0968252230
1985 Bingo! The Horrifying Eyewitness Account of a Prison Riot, Methuen, 216 pages, ISBN 0458997005
1988 Jojo, Stoddart Publishing, 180 pages, ISBN 0773722084
1992 Dreamcaper, Stoddart Publishing, 215 pages, ISBN 0773754865

References

Caron, Roger (1978) Go-Boy! Memories of a Life Behind Bars, Hushion House, 292 pages, ISBN 0968252230
Caron, Roger (1985) Bingo! The Horrifying Eyewitness Account of a Prison Riot, Methuen, 216 pages, ISBN 0458997005
Caron, Roger (1988) Jojo, Stoddart Publishing, 180 pages, ISBN 0773722084

External links

World Corporal Punishment Research - Detailed account from Go-Boy! about Caron's experiences being paddled (scroll half-way down page)
Paradox Pictures - Film company producing ''Go-Boy!'

1938 births | Canadian criminals | Canadian non-fiction writers | Parkinson's disease sufferers | Living people

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Roger Caron