Gilles Thibault's futile life in prison

   Gilles Thibault, who would be 82 now if he's still alive, was on the right path as a kid at a boarding school west of Montreal.
   Although his mother was a prostitute, she enrolled him in private school in hopes that he'd enjoy a better fate than hers.
   It all changed in in June 1943 when the principal came to tell him that his mother had died of tuberculosis.
   She was his only relative and he wanted to go to her funeral or see her buried but the school would not permit him to go, as he had an exam.
   So he stole the principal's bicycle and found the funeral home.
   He mourned all night talking to her in the open casket.
   But he did not return to the school, as he feared punishment for taking the bicycle.
   So he rode to downtown Montreal and sold the bike for $5 and was rounded up and put into a reform school for boys that was rife with sexual assault.
   He escaped that reform institution so many times that they put him in Bordeaux where one of his tasks was to wash the bodies of people who had been hanged. He was still only 15.
   Thibault was released in 1947 but got drunk, tried an armed robbery and was put in the maximum security wing of the St. Vincent de Paul prison in Laval, now closed.
   The same thing would happen over and over for 42 years. His longest stay outside the prison was a mere 120 days.
   He said that the conditions in prison in those days involved pounding rocks for six days a week with 16-pound sledgehammers. The prisoners were allowed to talk for 10 minute a day and were ordered to silence for the rest of the time.
   Anybody caught breaking rules was sent to the hole for 21 days, where they were given bread and water. If you talked while in the hole you were hit with a metre-long strap.
    He was released in 1970 and once again quickly committed a crime and was caught. He robbed a gas station of $48 and was sentenced to 20 years.
    But this time he was fed up and started studying psychology behind bars, and was finally released from the Archambault maximum security prison in December 1988.
   He moved into the 33rd floor of a downtown apartment high rise.
   "When I went in, everyone had horses, the baker, the milkman, the iceman, and they'd all stop and talk to you. Today everybody's running. Nobody says hi, nobody says hello," he told a journalist in 1989.
"And you can see on their faces they're anxious. Most of these people should be on Valium  They're more screwed up than the guys inside."
   He wrote a book telling his story, in the aims of keeping troubled youth from pursuing lives of crime.
   "I'll show them my record and say 'Look. I was like you and look where it got me.' I thought I was the only smart person on earth. And if I can keep only five or six of them a year out of a penitentiary, then, if there is a life after death, I'll have something in the balance in my favor."