Roger "Mad Dog" Caron (April 12, 1938 – April 11, 2012) was a Canadian robber and the author of the influential prison memoir Go-Boy! Memories of a Life Behind Bars (1978). At the time of publishing, Caron was 39 years old and had spent 23 years in prison.

Early life

Roger Caron was born in 1938, to extremely poor parents Donat and Yvonne in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada. During his first weeks of infancy Caron could not keep food down and was constantly gasping for breath, which subsequently led to him being rushed to the local hospital on several occasions. Though no definitive diagnosis was given for his breathlessness, Caron grew up "very edgy about anything affecting [his] breathing". He could not 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; younger brother Gaston followed in 1944. Caron's father Donat, 20 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. Caron told the priest he had accidentally broken the hand off a large Saint Joseph statue in his house while playing, thinking Saint Joseph's vengeful 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 did not 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. The sale of alcohol had been made legal in Ontario in 1927, but the law at the time required that bars and liquor stores close early, which made bootlegging profitable in Ontario for decades after 1927 as many people wanted to drink past the early closing time. In the beginning the Caron family bootlegging was a small-scale operation, but it soon grew to a level at which Donat would have to rent parking for his customers and find hiding places for 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 officer who would warn them when a raid was coming, for 25 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, leaving the police 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 Caron's pet rooster claiming it was an accident. Caron flew into a rage and had to be physically pulled off the man. Caron's 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. The Canadian journalist Catherine Forgarty described Go-Boy! as a hallowing and graphic account of how Caron was from the age of 16 onward "...whipped, stabbed, clubbed, tear-gassed, raped and subjected to years in solitary confinement".

Corporal punishment

Go-Boy! covered in graphic detail how prisoners were subjected to corporal punishment by being whipped with paddles designed to inflict physical pain. Caron was paddled on two occasions within a short time when he was 17 years old with a leather 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".

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. The film adaptation, eponymously titled 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 29 other submissions.

Bingo!

Bingo! The Horrifying Eyewitness Account of a Prison Riot (1985), released seven years after publishing Go-Boy!, is Caron's account of 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 one of the oldest prisons in the country, from the perspective of Caron, himself an inmate at Kingston during the riot. Bingo is Canadian prisoner slang for a prison riot. Caron wrote that the three toughest prisoners at Kingston penitentiary in 1971 were Barrie MacKenzie, Brian Beaucage and Wayne Ford who were all "natural leaders" who were "not to be fucked with" by the other prisoners.

In Bingo!, Caron emphatically denied the claims made by the media at the time that there was a massive number of homosexual gang rapes during the riot as he declared: "No rapes occurred during the riot. Any convict caught committing such an act would have been torn apart by the prison population in much the same fashion as an undesirable [prisoner slang for a child molester] would have been treated. Of course there was sex during the riot, but only among willing parties. If a blanket was hung over the door of a cell you didn't go in".

In Bingo!, Caron wrote the prison barber, Billy Knight, who started the riot lost control as the uprising continued. Caron described a power struggle between MacKenzie, who wanted to surrender to save lives after it was made clear that the Crown had rejected most of Knight's demands vs. Beaucage who wanted the uprising to end in a bloodbath. Caron wrote about Beaucage's demands that: "What was building up inside the dome was a mass suicide pact orchestrated by the insane element". Caron wrote it was the Solicitor-General, Jean-Pierre Goyer, who was responsible for Knight losing control after he gave a speech saying that the government would not negotiate with Knight, which the other inmates such as Beaucage were aware of by listening to their transistor radios. After the riot ended, the prisoners were sent to the new Millhaven Institution where the prisoners were all beaten by the guards in violation of the Crown's promises that the prisoners at Kingston penitentiary would not be beaten if they surrendered peacefully.

Jojo

Jojo (1988) 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.

Dreamcaper

Dreamcaper (1992) was Caron's last novel, a story based on a 1976 armed robbery of a Brink's truck in Montreal, Quebec.

Later life

Caron was paroled after the success of Go-Boy!. He eventually won a contract with Correctional Services Canada to give motivational talks to inmates and was considered a rehabilitation success. In February 2004, he was sentenced to 20 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 63 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 67 years old, Caron was released from Maplehurst Correctional Complex in April 2005 and had been living as a free man in Barry's Bay with his wife, Barbara. He subsequently lived alone in a retirement home in Plantagenet, Ontario. He suffered from dementia and Parkinson's disease.

Death

Caron died on April 11, 2012, one day before his 74th birthday, at the Sandfield Place Nursing Home in Cornwall, Ontario.

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 (first edition), McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 264 pages,
  • 1985 Bingo! The Horrifying Eyewitness Account of a Prison Riot, Methuen, 216 pages,
  • 1988 Jojo, Stoddart Publishing, 180 pages,
  • 1992 Dreamcaper, Stoddart Publishing, 215 pages,

See also

  • Prison reform
  • Stephen Reid

Citations

References

  • Caron, Roger (1978) Go-Boy! Memories of a Life Behind Bars, Hushion House, 292 pages,
  • Caron, Roger (1988) Jojo, Stoddart Publishing, 180 pages,
  • World Corporal Punishment Research – Detailed account from Go-Boy! about Caron's experiences being paddled (scroll halfway down page)
  • Paradox Pictures – Film company producing Go-Boy!