Hard Candy

Charles Carroll and his brother, Bobby, had the misfortune of being hard-to-place foster children and New Jersey in the 1950s. So the "powers that be" simply reclassified them from "orphan" to "retarded" and exiled them to a state-mental institution. There they remained for nearly ten years, deprived of their civil liberties, devoid of their right to an education, and denied any semblance of a humane existence. Beneath the sanitized façade of the institution's administrative offices and visiting rooms were cramped dormitories and dank basement hellholes. Lazy and inept personnel foisted off supervision of these children to ruthless monitors-children themselves-who maintained order through methods so sadistic and horrific that "child abuse" seems a chillingly inadequate label. Charles was a victim of an uncaring, ignorant, and underfunded system-one that was kept just out of the view of polite society. But the differentiating aspect of Charles's incarceration in this "nuthouse" is the ironic, cosmic hook in this story: he was not nuts. He was, in fact, a sensitive and perceptive child with a normal IQ. Moreover, Charles was consciously and painfully aware of every moment of his own abuse as well as the torment of his mentally defective fellow patients. Enduring their collective plight and clinging to his sanity, as one would a tiny glimmer of hope, he vowed to one day write this remarkable story of survival-not for his sake, but for the sake of society's outcasts and those too helpless to help themselves, then and now.