[1] 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.
With their house full of religious articles, and the dishes rattling and bed shaking caused by the train, Caron felt ghosts were haunting him.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Originally sent to the Ontario Reformatory in Guelph as a teenager, for breaking and entering, his "career" in prison grew exponentially after constant bad judgments and indulgences of a personal inner rage that Caron seemed unable to stifle.
While they were being marched from the recreation centre, Caron and a handful of inmates made a break for the woods at the fringes of the Brampton reformatory, amid fellow convicts' cries of "Go-Boy!"
Caron successfully eluded the stalking prison guards and fled, not fully aware of how bleak his life would become over the following decades.
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.
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".
covered in graphic detail how prisoners were subjected to corporal punishment by being whipped with paddles designed to inflict physical pain.
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.
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.
[8] In Bingo!, Caron wrote the prison barber, Billy Knight, who started the riot lost control as the uprising continued.
[9] Caron wrote about Beaucage's demands that: "What was building up inside the dome was a mass suicide pact orchestrated by the insane element".
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.
He eventually won a contract with Correctional Services Canada to give motivational talks to inmates and was considered a rehabilitation success.
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.
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.
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.
On October 12, 2001, police, acting on an anonymous phone tip, arrested Caron at the Rideau Centre in downtown Ottawa for allegedly carrying a loaded revolver, wig, scarf, several hats, and change of clothes.
[citation needed][13] 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.
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.