Hard Candy: Nobody Ever Flies Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Charles Carroll and his brother, Bobby, had the misfortune of being hard-to-place foster children in 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.