Jelly Beans

A campsite media. Roger was back at the Kingston Penitentiary for the very simple reason that the wardens and directors of the Canadian Penitentiary Service wanted out of the business of worrying about Roger Kuran. He'd built a reputation for escaping, for being a go boy, for striking fear in the hearts of those tasked with keeping him behind bars. The Kingston pen was the one place where they could definitively say he wasn't going anywhere, even he knew it, and

He says, Cara. He says, are you all right?

Karan?

He called again, but Roger didn't respond. The guard got right up against the bars and shone the light directly on Roger's head. His hair looked messy, his skin paler than it should, and he remained unresponsive. So the guard speed walks to the nearest call station and calls the hospital line to say, you better get down here.

So a lot of guys that slashed to visa at night when he went to day, and the guard to come in the morning. The only way he knew was there just helsposed to blot out break from him.

A nurse and some more guards rushed to sell C.

Two seven, got the other guard and got the nurse in the arms, open the door, lift the leader swarm the door over, Carl, Are you all right?

Still no movement from Roger. So the guard reaches out to nudge him awake. But when he did, Roger's head rolled off the bed and fell on the floor, by which I mean the mannequin head made by Roger Karan fell to the floor.

Over fell on the floor. And the guys, they told me the garden almost fell over. The radiote on the floor. You don't have and he said, walks on wims.

The police rushed to the prison and out on the lake. A police boat putted back and forth on Lake Ontario with its spotlight on the exterior wall. Guards were called in the middle of the night. They brought in the dogs. It was all hands on deck. And while all that was going on, as the crowd and the sound of sirens grew, Roger was cursing himself, huddled under the weather tarp in the Kingston Pen sports shack, muttering to himself that he should have spent one more day on the mannequin head.

So I had a hair from the barber shop, I had blacks with parison, and I may have managed, and I had turned his head into the wall, but I didn't have time to this skinning was almost pale light. I didn't have time to get the guy was going to give me his artist kit, and he didn't have time to.

Deliver it to me.

He knew that it was going to be too pale, and now his whole plan was foiled. He was not a go boy this night, but merely a man under a tarp with forty feet of rope and a grappling hook. Oh yeah, he managed to procure a grappling hook somehow. But even though the jig was up, he certainly wasn't just going to step out with his hands up. Not his style. If they were going to find him, he was going to stubbornly make them find him.

And they pound me a two dollard warning there. I understand he found me. He was sports check. I got my head in, hands on my hit and my rope book is all kid knuckle in his shaw and they got shot guns. And right, wasn't the gun towers or counting squat by something that they get tacked? Thought was very easy.

Once they had him, they marched him straight to the warden, who had made his way down the hill in his pajamas from his home across the street. He greeted Roger with a sarcastic good evening. The warden was done worrying about Roger, the most slippery inmate in his prison, so to put him out of his mind, the warden sentenced him on the spot to two years in the hole. Roger knew that he was in trouble, but two years he was shocked.

Two years ago, holds unheard of him. You go to hold the twenty one days on bread and water, seven days, thirty days I maginum.

But Roger was led away to begin two years of solitary. It was clear that the warden was trying to erase Roger from his prison and bury him beneath the foundations, and it would take everything Roger had to claw his way back from iHeart podcasts and campsite media. I'm Sam Mullens and this is Go Boy, episode four Jellybeans.

So we're really going down at the base of the air.

The hole in the Kingston Pen refers to a much feared block of cells where inmates were sent for prescribed amounts of solitary confinement as punishment. Parents have timeouts to keep their children in line, teachers have detention, and the guards at KP had the hole with which to threaten their subjects. I'll give you the tour. Imagine a short, well liit hallway with ten wooden doors on the right

No sheet, no matrist, no nothing cover, all spots paper, cup of toothbrust and a cement clock worn grew day.

It was all as bare as bear could be, and he couldn't bring anything with you.

No personal effects.

This is Bill Isaacs, a longtime guard at KP, who'd seen it all.

If themate wanted to read, he was entitled to a Bible and that was the only source of reading material.

The walls are solid, impenetrable concrete. There are no windows or natural light in the hole, which is not to say it's dark or gloomy.

For two years and you didn't know what the darkness like and no windows, nothing, just a two hundred ball burn ninety day like being in the middle of Sahara desert. He never turn the lights out.

With the aspect of the whole that would drive men literally out of their minds was the light bulb. To hear Roger describe it, it was brighter than the Saharan sun. And they kept that thing on twenty four hours a day. The only way that you were allowed to dim the brightness was with your eyelids. Anything beyond that was strictly prohibited.

If I pull the lights over, nay, the darks Committee take my minkets away from the trevells over the head, they take my coveralls and probably even make it.

Prisons are, in fact, the whole criminal justice system is an analyst theaters of humiliation.

Grahame Stewart is a prison rights advocate and the former executive director of the John Howard Society, a nonprofit focused on prison reform. He's seeing what solitary can do to a man.

Losing that kind of control in your life is humiliating, and you don't get over that. You don't get over I absolutely convinced that of all the pains of imprisonment. That's the one you can't get beyond.

The guards would supervise the sory souls of the whole through a barred sort of skylight. In the ceiling of each unit. There was a catwalk that they would pace above the cells on, so when an inmate would look up, there would periodically be the face of a guard peering down on them like a malevolent god.

They were against the officers looking down at them because it looked like they were in a lockage, like somebody looking in a zoo cage looking at an animal. So you'd get inappropriate comments and a lot of bad language from the inmates, you know, like what the hell are you looking at? But a lot stronger than that.

According to Roger, the guards who were assigned to the hole were some of the most sadistic in the prison. Let me put it this way. If they were well liked and charismatic in the eyes of the Brotherhood of prison guards, they'd probably be working upstairs on a better assignment.

Well, guards are charged the whole, nice people. No decent guard would ever ask the whole. Only said that as keep it real.

Say, one could frame solitary confinement as quiet time. Perhaps a break from having to watch your back.

But solitary confinement is not private accommodation. Okay, it's a lot worse than that.

Graham Stewart.

Again, I've had many people say, well, i've ever had to go to prison, I'd want to be in solitary because basically it's the afraid of being in the population. But solitary is deeply painful. It's such isolation from every stimulus. You don't know if it's date or night, you don't know what time it is, you have nothing to do. It's just like being in a closet or or a bathroom really for twenty three hours a day.

We went into the hole during our reporting trip to KP and I hated it in there. In the hole, the walls are so close that you can hear your breath echo, if that makes sense, like you've been bare alive, and that feeling is psychologically dangerous.

Longer they're there, the more damage they are, and it's a damage that lasts the rest of their life. You can't undo an experience.

Like that, which is all to say for Roger, there was much more at stake than finding a way to endure this punishment. This wasn't something he could white knuckle like the paddle or shock therapy to get through this. He'd need to stay vigilant just to keep his grip on his sanity. But would you believe me if I told you that inside this cell, this tomblike space, is where Roger would eventually have his greatest breakthrough. One day, Roger was in a cell when suddenly he heard a

It was not.

Themates way of communication. The ways that she used to talk, especially in segregation, was you know, obviously, through the toilet system.

Even though great effort was put into keeping these men in perfect isolation, something was overlooked. Like Jeff Goldbloom says in Jurassic Park, Life finds a Way.

I had some niggers down there. I never seen it. I knew there was a guy called Jocko and a guy called George down there, and we could never see each other. We discovered that the old plumbing system was so old, sore, so primitive that it weaned very quietly, took our paper cup and took the water on the toilet, bowed it down. The state until there was no more water in the toilet, and then we cleaned their toilet

The only drawback to this clandestine phone line was that sometimes it'd be too busy to work because the men in the hole weren't the only ones on the line.

Kingston was infested with the biggest, fattest stewart rats you ever seen, and then the ukating down every two centuries. No bake along, yellow teeth creature. You're all running into.

Pikes that we're talking to do And for several months, this is how Roger was able to keep it together. The days of silence were more bearable knowing that that night when the guards change shifts, that at least be someone to talk to.

Oh nay long from midnight till six o'clock and guards to come on duty next morning. I said, hey, Jocko, say yeah, say what's happening.

Maybe one of the more iconic do you remember where you were? Moments Roger learned that JFK was shot with his head in the toilet, straining to hear the details in disbelief. This period of nightly chatter definitely bought Roger some time, a precious little engagement to keep his head clear, but it wasn't to last. Guys were usually only put down there for a few weeks here or a month there, but sometimes there wouldn't be anyone staying in the hole

I'm going to escaped prison. You curl up on the poor and get day dream I'm not in jail. I'm not in jail. I'm in Hawaii. And all of a sudden, you're in all white, And the gardener looked into the people and said, you're not an all white take his cue. It gets a place of guys with like a bomb going off hisself.

Like an he gets a whole screaming and red and raving and shaving from now wrapper the garden will walk down to the catwalk lacking go steth each other was really funny.

Was shaking on, going crazy, literally crazy.

When the guards would suddenly wrap the glass with their keys. It would take him hours to recover from the shock from this one single stimulus, the one sound in his life. In Roger's brief moments of lucidity, he could see where this was going, and he knew that if he didn't do something, he could get lost forever. And it's here that Roger got an idea. One day, when the guard swung by to collect Roger's food tray, the guard was surprised to see that the food remained untouched where he

My scheme was to put on a crazy act. By no means an original idea, because cons in every prison throughout the world have tried it. I was going to have to put on a tremendous act to convince the guards, doctor and warden that I was psychotic. They knew all

But in the early going, they weren't buying what Roger was selling. They knew who he was and what he was capable of.

The guards a genio or rigord meal, and they said, no, old boss like the one, and the key just said, well can I add it?

So, right in front of Roger, as a stomach was practically digesting itself, the guard would make Roger watch as he slowly would eat his dinner in front of him. By day eight, Roger didn't have to act like his health was in jeopardy anymore. It literally was. It's a testament to how sick Roger must have looked on that day because the guards were concerned enough to call the doctor. On day twelve, it was the psychiatrist who finally made the call to transfer Roger to the psychiatric ward. His

In the country if one flew over the propos nests team.

Compared to this, in all, the Regional Treatment Center or RTC, was a separate building within the walls of the Kingston Penitentiary campus, and it operated completely separate from the prison. They had their own innate that didn't mix. They had their own staff and guards that operated independently of the prison, and it wasn't often that an inmate was transferred from

What's your guys, best guess?

Is this like thirty feet yeah?

Okay?

Standing there eye level with the top of the wall. It really is tauntingly close. It's easy to imagine Roger sipping his soup, peering over the top of it, his freedom staring him in the face. Once Roger got his health back to a relatively robust state in between his bi weekly electroshock therapy sessions, he got down to what he does best. He worked quickly to procure a hacksaw blade and was even able to get word to some old friends in the shop that he was going to

I was stad in the stomach. Gucks come over my hand and my spleaming montred. I gotta put long star on my stomach. Got two knights slaves and my.

Nose and oh nose, you know over.

When he was discovered by two orderlies, they moved quickly and rushed him to the civilian hospital.

I was the fastest I ever got out the penitentiary in Yami's eleven o'clock at night, going through the front gates, and I got to my hand.

Blood's flying out everywhere.

As Roger slushed around in the ambulance like a puddle on the floor, everything around him was frantic and chaotic, but inside he was certain that this would be his final night on earth. He watched the paramedics as he slipped in and out.

By the time he got to hot I was just going unconscious, you know, and all these keyboard ripping my toes off, and you don't know me. And a priest comes over to me and he says, you know, he says he mind go to pray over it, and everything's all blurred and on our member.

Saying, well help you south now, I just played you say you're.

Shifting the day.

Meanwhile, one hundred and eighty miles away in Montreal, well, we were at home.

In the phone rings.

This is Roger's niece, Diane, and my mother.

Gets off the phone and she was really really upset and she was crying and I said, Mom, what's wrong? And she says, Roger's been stabbed all over and they don't think he's going to live. And then so we prayed. We all prayed, you know, because in those days, that's what you did and that's how.

You did it.

So Roger's sister and mother rushed from Cornwall all the way to Kingston. Here's Sue Roger's sister.

They forewarned us that more than likely when we arrived, he may not be alive. And we got there and there were tubes coming out of him, and he had a guard inside the room and a guard outside the door of the room.

As Sue stood at her brother's side, she held his hand, urging him to hang on.

I remember him squeezing my hand. He held my hand so hard, actually heard me, you know, but he could have broke it. I would not have moved my hand away, so he recognized us, that's for sure.

It had been a long time since she'd been able to touch her brother, to breathe the same air as him outside of prison.

And I would explained to him, you know, the surgery is what happened, because half his nose had been ripped away, and he had been knifed in his stomach area, which caused him to lose his spleen. They did surgery on

Roger was placed back in the hole by the warden at the earliest possible opportunity. His whole fiasco in the psychiatric hospit had only signaled to those keeping him in solitary that they'd been making the right choice. It proved what they'd suspected all along, that if they ever gave Roger Kerran even the slightest of openings, he do everything he could to slip through. So he was back where he started. The only difference now was that he had

And a person starts to turn on themselves.

In that environment, Graham Stewart again.

They get very depressed, or they get very angry, or they get delusionble. You can't undo an experience like that. Imagine what it's like going day after day. So it's a deep trauma.

Roger would pace his cage like an animal for an entire day or was it an entire night, He couldn't tell, and the guards certainly weren't going to help him get

And my hearing was so acute. I to sometimes say street slice of ripped of my supper trade. And it got so quiet around midnight that I started hearing this cracking sun. Where's it come from? I got here my grit, I put my ear there, and might I could hear my grit drying up?

Around this time, Roger started to hear other things down there too, and down in.

All almost two years, hallucinating.

That your voice all Roger would be laying on his bed, basking in the Saharan sun when he'd hear a whimper and.

Here I hear a female voice cry every night at eleven o'clock when the guards cheeks shift, and she was so lonely, so distressed, and I was so lonely and so distressed.

Every night the sobbing became a little clearer, like she was right there in the cell with him. So he'd murmur things to her, tell her that they were going to be okay, that they were both going to find a way to survive this.

And she I could hear a crying. Her tears were coming out of all fourst of my cellar. A voice was like a fallowist and rocky home crazy or lucinating. I'm nervous, I'm bouncing off all the walls.

Roger started to slip into the space he was afraid of where he was entering into a dangerous forest that he might never make it out of.

I was so nervous that one night I fell a spigure. Must have been after midnight, like I armed behind my I had a real bad dream. I woke up from these bad dreams, and all of a sudden, I felt this presence behind me, and I turned my head and rooting roll and I spotted these five fingers. Well, I had jumped so high they all took.

And it was around this time when Roger started to become frightened of his own limbs. When it happened a bonafide Christmas miracle. On Christmas Eve, suddenly a vision came to visit Roger in his solitary cell. But this time, for once, it wasn't a vision at all. It was real. A tall man in a navy blue uniform entered his cell and regarded Roger with a warm look on his face.

Christmas Eve around a state of populdn't you go?

Open?

And then he walked a captain in the Salvation Army guy. And first time I had ever seen one of these guys in a hole, like for two years they lived in a hole, never seen anything.

Salvation Army offers the true spirit of Christmas. The man from the Salvation Army firmly shook Roger's hand and gave him a gift.

They gave you a personalized Christmas card. And then he gave me a bag of candies and Mike Candy Shop with Mormon of jelly beans, all kinds of carsn't it.

Roger looked down at the jelly beans and card in disbelief. As the man tipped his hat, said Merry Christmas and was gone.

They closed the door. I sick crossed lady on the floor. So I got these jelly beans. I want to eat them all right away, I said, no, six hours, it's going to be Christmas eve. I'm going to wait until a shift changes, when the guards come, and I'll know it's midnight and it's it's a Merry Christmas, Roger, and then eat on my tige beans.

But as midnight approached, Roger kept staring at his jelly beans. They were the first objects that weren't prison food or an army blanket or a book that he'd been allowed in the hole. And they were so beautiful, so perfect. Some of them were colors he quite literally hadn't seen in years. It seemed a waste to chew them up and swallow them, so he thought about what else he could use them for. He saw his least favorite guard glaring at him through the skylight, and then this.

Suddenly came to me as a Christmas heat. But I only tell him what I think of is is that you know, I saw a writing word on the floor, a real nasty word on the floor. Then he came with it being malicious as directed him not playing the game, and a good king of nasty word to only three or four of them as well.

So as the clock turned over to Christmas, Roger spelled out the word pig on the floor with his jelly beans and looked up at the skylight expectantly. When the guard appeared in the window, pull.

My hands back. I looked up at him. He looks at the word. All of a sudden, he became livid. Just show me with rage, you know, Please start banging and saying this and that. I look at it like he's crazy. You know, what's the matter with you? Boston.

Roger had tried many things to intentionally enrage the guard since he'd been down there, but nothing had got a reaction like this. It was beautiful when.

He's shaking his fast like you know what's happening, you know.

Then he walked away mumbling to himself, and I sat there and on I says, my god, the power of the written word is incredible.

The next guard got the word dog, the one after that jerk. For two days, Roger racked his brain to spell the worst three and four letter words he could think of.

Four days after I was expressing myself, I found a goon squad come charging myself with clubs and as masks, pinned me up against the wall, and he confiscated my jelly beans. I was using my fist, I was using my stupidity all these years, and I wasn't getting nowhere. All of a sudden, I just reverted to a few words, and I got a terrific reaction of it.

And this was it.

Roger had only written a few monosyllabic words out of jelly beans. But even in the moment, he knew that something, a much bigger shift was happening.

Are knew something happened in my life.

He needed to write more words. He needed to But how when he remembered that all inmates were granted upon request, something he never thought to ask for.

Suddenly I found myself asking the school teacher if he would send me down some pencils in a scribber, not knowing why or what, except that this compulsion in need his urge to express my inner aguage, my turmoil.

As the stationary and pencils make their way down to the hole, it's worth pausing to point out the unlikelihood of what happened next. This man had almost no education, he had no voice. He was the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the prison and society. And against all of this, his words were about to change everything. Go Boy is a production from Campside Media in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,