In 1960, 18-year-old Wayne Carlson was convicted for stealing cars, and spent his twenties and thirties in penetentiaries and prisons across Canada and the U.S. But Carlson was no ordinary inmate - what set him apart was his penchant for escaping from captivity. From Saskatchewan to Vermont, Carlson broke out of jail 13 times, making him the most-escaped prisoner in modern North American history. More than just a skillful escape artist, ever since gaining his freedom in 1998, Carlson has become one of Canada's most respected activists for prison reform. He is a member of the Samaritans of Southern Alberta and a founding member of The Prison Sams Program, a group that brings attention to the correlation between prison and suicide. Breakfast with the Devil is both a wild ride with an outlaw and a firsthand look at life behind bars in some of North America's maximum security prisons. But above all else, Carlson's memoir is an amazing tale of one man, driven by his desire for freedom, reaching beyond the realm of the possible. They didn't call him "Houdini" for nothing.
The 1960s and '70s were a kaleidoscope of drugs and convicts for Alberta-based writer Carlson. An angry young recidivist first imprisoned at 18 in 1960 for auto theft, he displayed a talent for improvising simple jailbreaks (once he used a carved wooden "gun"), as well as more elaborate ones involving fellow prisoners. He escaped from custody 13 times in Canada and the U.S., making him arguably the "most-escaped prisoner" in North America. His laconic narrative doesn't address the evidently close relationship between 1970s counterculture and the criminal underground (although free-spirited women friends frequently abetted his activities). After several escapes and protracted manhunts in Vermont, irritated officials transferred him to the "super max" federal prison in Marion, Ill. Life in this fierce institution was alternately violent and mundane, and rife with racial mistrust. Prisoners escaped even from Marion: Carlson sat out one dramatic escape in which a convict electrician rewired the gate controls a year before the actual jailbreak. In 1976, Carlson was returned to the Canadian authorities, and he and accomplices repeatedly escaped from yet more prisons, but were inevitably caught and received more time. Carlson was paroled in 1998; although he details his eventual decision to rehabilitate himself via his writing and his work with the Prison Samaritans Program, an outreach organization for at-risk convicts, much of this deadpan telling displays the selective vagueness sometimes found in career criminal narratives. Still, this unusual, rueful memoir gives a rare portrait of a beleaguered Canadian corrections system, and its engaging catalogue of illicit escape techniques might win readers on both sides of the razor wire.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
