If I was condemned to live as long

 as God, I'd never forget it.
Never!

Ken Kesey’s book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was a fictional  account of abuses in a state mental hospital, while my book HARD CANDY: Nobody Ever Flies Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is the true story.  HARD CANDY spotlights a hard look into the bleak world of secretive bureaucracies that continue to maintain its operations just short of the Stone Age of insanity.  HARD CANDY is the book they never wanted written.

 

 

Book Description From the Back Cover

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 facade 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 high 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.

 

BESTSELLER

In Canada, on September. 18, '2006, HARD CANDY made #1 on the Amazon bestseller list for the genre, Family & Childhood.  In the U.S. on February 1, 2008, the book took #3 on the Amazon bestseller list for the genre, Memoir/Biography. On October 20, 2008, the book made #2 on the Amazon bestseller list for the genre, Dysfunctional Relationships, and on October 23, 2009, HARD CANDY made the Amazon bestseller list for the genre, Child Abuse.  SPECIAL NOTE: These bestseller lists are the avenues by which "better books" make it to the national bestseller list.

AWARDS

HARD CANDY won the 2005 MIPA Book Award, receiving Honorable Mention for Memoir/Biography from the Midwest
Independent Publishers Association. http://www.mipa.org/awards.html

 

HARD CANDY won the 2006 Hollywood Book Festival Award, receiving Honorable Mention for Biography/Autobiography for
greater recognition from the film and television communities--literature worth further consideration for the screen.
http://www.diyreporter.com/news/news2.asp?news2_id =373
http://www.hollywoodbookfestival.com/

 

KUDOS

Mr. Carroll... I fully share your view that awareness and education are essential to child abuse prevention... and I do wish you every
success with your project.

—Henry Waxman
Congress of the United States

 

Mr. Carroll... It's evident that you are committed to standing up in the face of injustice--may you continue with that depth of
commitment in your writing and all that you do.

                                                                                                                                                                                              —Elie Wiesel

    Recipient of the Congressional Medal of  Honor  

 

HARD CANDY is important and brave, comprehensive, real, and ever so true. It opens us to the real culprits of sexual abuse—the
people, the secular authorities, to whom we've entrusted our children. It talks about who does it, how it happens, why it happens,
how to recognize it, and what to do. Charles A. Carroll opens the doors on our society's most hidden plague, the sexual abuse
of boys.

—Chuck Rosenthal

           Author of the book: Never Let Me Go:

A Portrait of Sexual Predation  

There is one thing wrong with this book! If I were the publisher of this book, I would have insisted on titling it A Terrible, Terrible
Crime or some other terribly dramatic title so that it would better attract the morbid curiosity of the mass reading public, become a
bestseller and help end a terrible crime. This book deserves to be a bestseller!

                                                                                                                                                                                              —Art Kunkin

                                                                                                                                                                    Founder, Publisher and Editor

                                                                                                                                                                               Los Angeles Free Press

 

Thank you so very much for telling your story.  More of our staff around the country need to read your book and hear you speak.

                                                                                                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                                                                —Bret Li-Vaks, MBA

                                                                                                                                                                         Center For Family Support
                                                                                                                                                                            Director of Day Services
Paramus, NJ

 
The story Carroll tells will read like wild fiction to some readers. But I  can attest that the Hell he describes is no exaggeration. My mother worked at state mental hospitals in Michigan in the 1980s and 1990s. I worked in private care, lasting all of three months. As an attorney, I represented several private psychiatric hospitals, orphanages, and child care facilities, public and private, in sex abuse and wrongful death cases. I learned what "positional asphyxia" can do to the body of a child, and how hard it is to find a resident who's wandered away before he freezes. Much of it I'm bound by privilege not to repeat. But I've seen enough to know that Carroll's story is true. http://laurajames.typepad.com/clews/2006/11/

—Laura James, Esq.

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

WHY I WROTE THE BOOK

‘If I lived as long as God, I’d never forget it, never!’

When I set out to write the book I wanted to believe in the system.  I wanted to  believe things had changed, and I wanted to believe in the public myth that is doesn’t happen anymore, and had I learned it was otherwise, I would not have written this book, because with my story alone, the reader would simply come way thinking, oh, well, that was more than 40  years ago, it doesn’t happen anymore. Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence is clear, the atrocities are current, ongoing, and tragically appalling -- and this was the elixir that injected iron into my backbone and sulfur into my blood, to not only write my book, but to also be a voice for those victims who, today, are still trembling behind closed doors awaiting redemption from their abusive reign  of hell. 

HARD CANDY is a human portrayal of an uncommon nature. No one thing contributes more to its value than its   authenticity, but be forewarned, you will not find literary frills,  polite language, soft corners of prose, soothing seams of  dialogue, happy jingles, or joyful songs. You will find, however, a thread of love  that weaves together the entire story—a story about a special devotion shared   between my brother and me and how we cared for each other when no one else would, how we understood each other when no one else did, and how we desperately clung to the needed components of love and friendship to survive—together—the horrific reality. 

 

HARD CANDY will give you a glimpse into the bleak world of institutional “bad   guys”—administrators, civil servant caretakers and resident monitors that stood side by side with  idiots and madmen who deliberately committed atrocities against these children, causing many to flee into an unconventional brand of protection, which was a futile attempt to gain some semblance of refuge because there was no legitimate protection for them.  After suffering a decade of abuse, I was finally released from the mental institution baring the scars from having been denied my civil liberties, a right to an education which left with barely a second grade education, and any semblance of a humane  existence. 

 

Nevertheless, I managed to succeed against horrific odds, eventually entering adult night classes at Hollywood High School in Los Angeles where I earned a diploma in less than two years, but wanting to make better sense of the social system, I transferred to Los Angeles City College and, there, at the age of 27, I earned an Associate’s Degree in Sociology, but I was still not satisfied.  I transferred to California State University on Los Angeles and spent another two years there, finally leaving college and opening a successful electrical contracting business in Hollywood, California, and subsisted on that business for the next 25 years, but not without living without the tormenting screams of yesteryear’s children still trapped within the walls of my soul and memory, forever begging that I one day redeem them.  Finally in 1989, I heeded their calling.  I closed my business and began a six-year journey investigating places like New Lisbon Developmental Center and others like it across the country only to learn that little had changed from the time my brother and I were committed to such places.  And that's when set out to write HARD CANDY with the hope of making a profound difference. 

Please bear in mind, what happened to my brother and me stained our psychology, wrecked havoc with our spirit, and incubated an emotional worm that drilled holes in and out of our psyches until what was left of our psychology resembled the appearance of Swiss cheese. We had to fight off,  not only the sexual predators of the past (as they insisted on remaining in our photographic memories), but also deal with the many variations of, emotional dysfunctions gender deficiencies, troubles with sexuality, bonding issues, trusting others, and a host of other developmental issues.  But however psychologically wrenching our  living experiences, quitters we were not, fighters we were who, like two wild horses, refused to be broken—and that is the essence and strength of our remarkable story of survival.

BUT WAIT!

This is not just a true story of yesteryear.  HARD CANDY also dispels the myth that it doesn’t happen anymore.  Read all about the current U.S. Justice Department investigations in the appendices of the book to find out what they uncovered behind closed doors.  You won’t believe their findings. 

… AND YES, THERE IS A SCREENPLAY

Adapted to the screen from the book is a screenplay titled

 A STATE WARD’S REBELLION

Contact the author: Hardcandy.2@netzero.com