by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

To the men who disembark from the 69 Gouin bus every Friday with brown paper bags in tow, the brasserie at the Henri-Bourassa metro offers the first delicious taste of freedom. "When you get out after a year or two, they let you out with all your things in a brown paper bag," says Luc Markov, 45. "The waitresses see us and know right away where we're from. We're from Bordeaux prison. And that brasserie is the place to start as soon as we get out."

For Markov, the sudsy taste of freedom was too tempting to wait for. Between 1994 and 2000, the son of a bank robber from Park Ex spent about four years inside the provincial prison for minor thefts he committed to fuel a drug habit.

Like other prisoners who had served one-sixth of their sentence, Markov would be given breaks away from the prison, weekend passes known as "codes." But when some Sunday evenings would roll around, Markov couldn't bring himself to get back on the bus to jail.

Markov simply didn't return to complete his sentence "four or five times." One time he was caught trying to shoplift at a video store and was hustled back. Another time he resisted temptation and went back on his own free will. But the rest of the time he simply slipped into the outside crowd.

Avoiding the spotlight

Last year, 75 of the roughly 4,000 inmates in 18 provincial-run prisons snuck out of jail. Most are quickly found or return of their own will, but officials admit that they have no idea what happened to the rest. "They might be dead, they might be out of the country, we don't know," says Odette Ouimet, the warden of Montée St-François, a federal minimum-security jail.

Three prisoners from provincial prisons remain at large since last year. Inmates in provincial institutions are roughly evenly divided between those serving sentences of under two years and those who are awaiting trials or sentencing, for every variety of crime.

A Corrections Canada official listed eight inmates who have disappeared without being returned to prison over the past 10 years: Duzgon Atsiz, Pierre Charette, Martin Pellerin, Milos Ales, Pierre Campeau, Jeffrey Colegrove and Steven Solyom. Another escapee, Carl Bergeron, was killed during a home invasion last February. All had been sentenced to prison for serious offences, including weapons and drugs charges, and have, over the last few years, escaped, their present whereabouts unknown.

Little publicity is given to their disappearance, and no special task force or public initiative tries to get them back into custody. Unlike the USA, where citizens, through such programs as America's Most Wanted, are encouraged to look out for and report escapees, Quebec's law enforcement believes it can better apprehend them through stealth.

Some escapees have found it exceedingly easy to walk away from prison and return to society. Last year, a bankrobber convicted of shooting at police failed to return to Ste-Anne-des-Plaines prison from his duties at a handicapped centre in St-Jérôme. Renaud Brochu, 58, rented an apartment and did odd jobs like house painting, services he advertised in the Quebec City newspaper using his real name. Prior to turning himself in last August after three uneventful years of freedom, he reported that he'd even approach police in the street to chat without ever being suspected of being a fugitive from a serious jail sentence.

A decade ago, the issue of escaped convicts was taken much more seriously, when a spate of escapees committed a string of serious crimes: Patrick Legault shot and killed a 46-year-old stranger in St-Bruno after fleeing Bordeaux. In May 1993, Claude Forget, a fugitive from a Drummondville prison, shot two cops on Peel, both of whom survived with serious injuries, and in 1991, Daniel Lamer, while being sought for parole violations, robbed a Jean-Coutu pharmacy and took two hostages, one of them a police officer, whom he later shot and wounded (in March 2002, Lamer, out on parole again, was killed in an exchange of gunfire with Ontario Provincial Police).

Reasons to go

Markov understands the urge to escape what he describes as the "scary" world of prison life. "I've seen guys get beaten up so bad, crushed like Pepsi cans," he says. "It was really violent. They're at war in there, and there's lots of racial pressures. I've seen guys walk into my cell [and say], ‘Hey man, you have nice fuckin' clothes, we want them,' and I'd be like, ‘Fuck you, man.' Or they'd say, ‘We heard you have hash,' so I'd reply, ‘I'd sooner flush it down the toilet than let you take it!' You can't give in, otherwise they'll stomp all over you."

Rather than return to jail after a weekend outside, Markov became a homeless man, cultivating the look of a madman in order to get more money as a beggar. "I'd sleep outside, I had a big beard, like bin Laden," he says. "It was very scary. You're scared every time you see a police car, so that's why I was hiding on the streets."

Markov wouldn't even chance homeless shelters, in case authorities came to check. "I believe there are a few out there who went homeless because they're wanted by the authorities."

Escapee's rights

Popular fiction films from the Dirty Dozen to The Count of Monte Cristo have glorified escape, but in real life it's not generally celebrated by the public or authorities. Yet there are those who argue that the impulse to escape prison is a moral imperative. For 20 years, one of Quebec's most esteemed prison rights advocates has argued that prisoners should have a "right of escape."

"Just as the French revolution stated that citizens have the right to revolt against an oppressive government, we made the parallel that, as prison is an abnormal, inhuman place, then it's normal that people in such a place would want to leave," says Jean-Claude Bernheim, head of the Prisoners' Rights Committee. "By consequence, escape is not anti-social or an abnormal thing, it's quite the opposite when you consider that the human being is somebody who lives in society, who is devoted to liberty. It's normal that once locked up, one wants to escape."

When caught, escapees frequently get prison time added to their sentences and have subsequent parole delayed or denied, but Bernheim disputes this practice. "We must not reprimand normal behaviour. It's normal and human to want to escape. I think all prisoners dream about escaping. Everyone is seeking an exit door."

Bernheim argues that families should also be allowed to welcome escaped family members into their homes without consequence. "They're considered scary but these people are usually quite boring," he says. "The objective of an escapee is not to get caught - they'll try to get a job, they're people who try to avoid danger."

Ultimate escape

In Markov's case, one practice that encouraged him to go on the lam rather than return to captivity was the ritual where prison guards smell for alcohol in prisoners returning after a weekend free. "I'd go and get drunk and then get scared to go back because they'd put me in the hole. In the hole you have nothing, just a little blanket - you can't even smoke. They put you in the hole to see if you shit the dope out."

The last Sunday afternoon that Markov was ordered to return to jail, a Radio-Canada reporter he had been in touch with provided him with a tape recorder and invited him to sound out passers-by on whether he should return to jail or keep his freedom. "I was at the Mont-Royal metro and I asked people to give me one good reason to go back in jail. I even asked two cops, all the way up to the doors of the jail. The cops were moralizing, very clichéd, but the rest told me to do my time and get on with my life."

Markov's happy he made the ultimate escape, the escape from his demons. He's cohabitating with a prison counsellor and works cleaning up homes that in the past he'd be tempted to burgle. "I'd run because I couldn't stand going back to jail," he says. "I put a mask on in jail. When I got out I had a mask on. Now with the people who love me, I let the love in."