Click below to see the interview in our prison of Shaun Attwood. The PDF version has photograph’s of the man himself and some of the people from his book, “Hard Time”.
Interview with Shaun Attwood : Text only version
It’s not so much “Have you heard”, rather “How often” have you heard people complaining. “Prison is *hit! This place is a dump!” Just a few minutes in the company of Shaun Attwood might disabuse this view. Shaun visited our prison to be interviewed about his autobiographical book, “Hard Time.”
What was a well attended event began with Shaun presenting every member of the audience with a signed copy of his book, Shaun told us that he has already overseen the donation of 100,000 books to prisons and schools around the country. Then, after a brief introduction, I began to ask a series of questions. We learned that Shaun came from a loving family in a good home. The cruellest thing he suffered as a child was being made to try Brussels Sprouts with Christmas Dinner! While studying at Liverpool University he was a part of the Manchester Rave scene of the late 80’s and early 90’s. It was here that he experimented with ecstasy for the first time, “But I thought I was in control! I kept on telling myself ‘I can quit whenever I want’”
In 1991, and having completed his BA in Business Studies, Shaun moved to Arizona in the USA. He moved in with his aunt who helped him to forge the work permits he needed to get a job. He started working cold calling in a stock brokers office, an experience he likened to characters in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’. Five years later, Shaun was earning an average of $500,000 a year before he burned out completely. Towards the end of his stockbroking career he had begun to use drugs again, but now he was out of work, drugs became his full-time occupation. Step by step he introduced Ecstasy to more and more people. “The local stuff was rubbish, really crap. My product was being imported directly from Holland. I couldn’t keep up with demand.”
He became known locally as English Shaun, but his growing success saw him gather an entourage of followers. “I had so much money I was just throwing huge parties, I was the guy in the VIP area of clubs”. Aside from drugs, Shaun had his own rave clothes lines and music stores. But his success also brought him into contact and ultimately competition with gangs and organised crime. Later in life Shaun would meet a man who had been sent to abduct him and bury his body in the desert. Fortunately Shaun had been forced to leave club early – pure luck meant he missed being murdered by minutes. “When I look back I was an idiot. I had so much money. I could have paid off my parents mortgage dozens of times over, but I was just blowing it.”
By the late 1990’s the lifestyle began to take its toll and Shaun decided to try to go straight. He met a girl, Claudia, and dropped out of the club scene. He went back to college and everything was going to plan for a year. “One morning the door busted in. Claudia and I were surrounded by SWAT and police. I was cuffed and put into a squad car. The police had come looking for ‘English Shaun’”. The police had arrested over 30 of Shaun’s friends and acquaintances and when he applied for bail the court demanded $750,000. The District Attorney (DA) painted Shaun as the evil king pin of a massive drugs empire.
But above all, there was one key difference between the US and the UK – the Criminal Justice System. While Shaun was on remand one of the major newspapers, ‘The Arizona Sun’ ran an 8 page, full colour feature on ‘English Shaun and his Criminal Empire’. “That’s the way they work in America. Your first trial is in the media. The District Attorneys are ambitious, they want a career in higher offices and the way to do that is to win high profile cases. They like to be seen handing out 100, 200 year sentences or the death penalty.” Shaun went on to explain that the criminal justice system is a ruthless business. “If you run a trial and lose you can get slammed. Everybody knows that, so it becomes a negotiation to work out when you will plead and what you will plead guilty to.” In the end Shaun was worn down by the system. His girlfriend Claudia had been charged with unlawful possession of a prescription pill. Her conviction meant she was banned from visiting. Shaun began to devote his time to reading and yoga.
Shaun’s description of his journey through ‘The Horseshoe’ remand jail is harrowing. Every new door he progressed through seemed like a new level in Dante’s inferno. While bail was impossible for Shaun, the amount of his bond gained him some respect when he transferred to The Towers jail – and into the domain of the Sheriff Joe Arapaio. Arapaio was proud of his tough stance on crime. He was the subject of numerous lawsuits for wrongful deaths and human rights violations. He issued pink boxer shorts to all of his prisoners. Arapaio also boasted that he spent more on feeding his dogs than prisoners, saying “The dogs have done nothing wrong AND they work for a living.” Arapaio housed prisoner over-spill in tents in prison yards where temperatures regularly topped 100° F.
Conditions were no better inside the prison, “We were all covered in sores and rashes. We were bitten by every sort of bug. In bed you had to wrap yourself like a mummy – just leaving a breathing hole – in order to keep the cockroaches off you.” Shaun also described the racial tension within the prison system and how each ethnicity was clearly segregated. Early on he saw a suspected sex offender brutally beaten and hospitalised. As a white prisoner it had been left to the white gang leaders to dole out the punishment. He also described the tensions and power struggles within each group – there was no ‘opt-out’. Your ethnicity was your automatic gang membership.
I believe that anyone who has served time will relate to and identify with Shaun’s story as he describes uncertainty, nagging doubt and almost bi-polar shifts in emotions. His descriptions are interspersed with a selection of the many letters that he wrote to Claudia and his parents. It was when he read the book “The clandestine diary of an ordinary Iraqi” that he was inspired to write a secret blog about his time in Arapaio’s prisons. Genuine fear of reprisals from the authorities meant choosing an anonymous title – thus ’John’s Jail Journal’ was born. Once again, Shaun was forced to rely on his aunt to help him to smuggle the pages out of the prison. Despite global attention, Shaun told us that the thing that made him feel most proud was knowing that his aunt had gotten to read his serialised blog in ‘The Guardian’ newspaper before she died.
Sean was released after serving 6 years of a 9 year sentence. Claudia, his now ex-girlfriend, returned all of the letters that he had written which started him on the road to writing ‘Hard Time’. Shaun also wrote ‘Party Time’ and ‘Prison Time’ around his life before and during his sentence. More recently, Shaun has diversified and now writes about notorious criminals like Pablo Escobar, the Cali Cartel and high profile crimes. He has kindly donated a number of these books to the prison library. Asked how to start writing, he told us: “If you want to write, just read the authors that interest you.” His final piece of advice to any would be authors in the group was this. “If you can’t think of something to write about, then just write about global interest. Write about something that the worlds wants to hear and you will have massive sales. When I did the book about Pablo Escobar it far outsold any of my previous books about prison.”
