Authors: Anthony Papa Anne Mini Shaun Attwood
Hard Time
SHAUN ATTWOOD
studied business at Liverpool University and went on to become a millionaire day trader in Phoenix, Arizona—but he also led a double life. A fan of the Manchester rave scene, Attwood headed an organization that threw raves and distributed club drugs. While incarcerated, he submerged himself in literature, reading 268 books in 2006 alone. Attwood was released in December 2007 and continues to campaign against Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He keeps the blog
Jon’s Jail Journal
going by posting stories inmates continue to mail to him. Upon his release from prison in the United States, Attwood returned to England, where he is now rebuilding his life. He regularly speaks to audiences of young people about the perils of drugs and the horrors of prison life. His website is
www.shaunattwood.com
.
ANTHONY (TONY) PAPA
is an activist and the author of
15 to Life
. Papa was given a fifteen-year sentence to Sing-Sing, New York State’s maximum-security prison, after being convicted of his first drug offense. In prison he discovered painting. When the Whitney Museum gave an exhibition of his paintings, Governor Pataki got wind of his case, and after twelve hard years of time, Anthony Papa was granted clemency. Papa now works for the Drug Policy Alliance (
www.drugpolicy.org
) as a communications specialist. His work to change the Rockefeller Drug Laws has been covered in
Newsweek
and
Time
magazine. A movie depicting his life story is currently in development. Susan Sarandon says:
“
[Papa’s] story puts a human face on the nearly one million nonviolent drug offenders confined in prisons throughout the country.”
ANNE MINI
is the daughter of California’s best-known 1930s radical (the subject of John Steinbeck’s
In Dubious Battle
) Kleo Apostolides Dick Mini, the beatnik ex-wife of science fiction author Philip K. Dick. She holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard, a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and a doctorate from the University of Washington. She is the author of
A Family Darkly: Love, Loss, and the Final Passions of Philip K. Dick
, which won the 2004 Zola Award for Nonfiction. She was the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association’s Resident Writer for 2005 – 2006. A well-respected blogger on the writing life, her highly popular
Author! Author!
blog (
www.annemini.com
) has garnered numerous Internet awards. Mini lives in Seattle.
Life with Sheriff Joe Arpaio in America's Toughest Jail
Shaun Attwood
Anne Mini
Tony Papa
Copyright © 2011 by Shaun Attwood
Foreword copyright © 2011 by Tony Papa
Introduction copyright © 2011 by Anne Mini
This edition of the UK original title Hard Time is published by arrangement with Mainstream Publishing Co Ltd, 7 Albany Street, Edinburgh, EH1 3UG
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For my parents, sister, and all those who didn’t make it out of Sheriff Joe’s jail alive.
Doing hard time is not easy. I know because I served twelve years of a fifteen-to-life sentence for a drug sale at Sing Sing—a maximum security prison in Ossining, New York. There I learned what doing time was all about. It was not just about making X’s on your calendar and praying that your sentence would pass quickly. For me, doing time was learning to live in the present no matter how bleak it was.
I thought I had it rough. But after reading
Hard Time
by Shaun Attwood, I realized that I had it easy compared to what he went through. His chilling and revealing account of his imprisonment made me realize that where you serve your sentence for a crime makes a world of a difference. The safety of my maximum security prison made doing my time a piece of cake as opposed to the dangerous and out-of-control conditions of a jail that was under the guidance of Joe Arpaio.
What scares me is that across the country, cheap imitations of Arpaio, the so-called toughest sheriff in America, and the type of justice he promotes are taking hold, filling jails and prisons to overcapacity with non-violent drug war victims like Shaun. Attwood’s story brings home the bigger picture of the drug war, where places of confinement like the one that held Shawn become nothing more than death traps when they are devoid of rehabilitative programs. In short, they become warehouses of human misery, and it takes nothing short of a miracle to survive in them.
When Shaun came to America, he thought that it would be easy for him to enjoy the same partying life he experienced in England. But little did he know that the American government was on a path to create harsh federal penalties for party drugs such as ecstasy (MDMA).
They even took their zero tolerance drug policy a step further, prosecuting club and rave promoters under the “Crack House” law. It was argued that clubs that hosted electronic music dance acts functioned as crack houses because club patrons may have sold or used drugs. Even drug paraphernalia like glow sticks and pacifiers were considered contraband. Activists and drug policy organizations quickly began speaking out against this.
Many states such as Arizona followed this pattern of overzealous prosecution, and in 2002, when Shaun Attwood took his fall from grace, he joined the ranks of being imprisoned under some of the harshest drug laws anywhere.
Today, Shaun Attwood is a rehabilitated individual. After serving nine years, he was released. Instead of putting his past behind him, which most prisoners do when they serve hard time, he chose to utilize his experience to help others. Shaun now speaks to school children in England about his prison experience. He also publishes a prison blog that is used to help those who he has left behind, revealing the atrocities of imprisonment. In my view, because of this, Attwood is a remarkable person and a real hero to the 500,000 Americans currently imprisoned because of the war on drugs.
—Tony Papa
INTRODUCTION
I am still at the jail. A sudden spate of tragedies has compelled me to write this entry. At the weekend, two inmates on my floor attempted to commit suicide. One threw himself off the balcony and survived. The other was discovered trying to hang himself. Sadder still, an inmate housed in a medium-security pod was found dead in the shower. Inmates are often “smashed” in the shower area because it is out of view of the cameras. The jail has refused to release the cause of his death.
I once asked a guard how the jail’s administration gets away with this and his response was, “The world has no idea what really goes on in here.”
When I was a small child, I imagined hell consisted of caves in which the damned were trapped, tortured and burnt. I imagined serpents and indescribable creepy crawlies tormenting the captives. I never imagined man’s nature could be so hateful as to recreate these conditions on earth.
This was the last blog post Shaun Attwood wrote in the county jail run by the famous Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona—words smuggled out at considerable personal risk to be posted online at his necessarily pseudonymous blog,
Jon’s Jail Journal
.
Jail
, mind you, not prison. Like the author, the suicidal two and deceased one had not yet been convicted of the crimes for which they were being held. Other inmates were in jail on sub-felony convictions.
None of them had yet as American citizens—or, like Shaun, immigrants to this country—been judicially deprived of their civil rights. Until I read this post, I, as U.S. citizen, had no inkling that people awaiting trial in Phoenix jails might be having their constitutional and human rights violated.
How could I? The world has no idea what really goes on in there.
Or didn’t, until Shaun risked his safety, his legal prospects, and even his life to bring his searing accounts of jail conditions to the public. For American readers, this inmate’s-eye-view could hardly be more relevant—or more disturbing.
It’s also a heck of a good yarn, a stunning tale of a writer struggling against incredible odds to tell a story that desperately needs to be told. Few memoirs, even ones set in prisons, were written on sweat-soaked scraps of paper with golf pencils sharpened on cell walls. Nor were their pages hidden in the binding of books that had to pass under the minute scrutiny of prison officials before armed guards were allowed to hand them to a brave visitor trembling on the other side of scratched Plexiglas. Nor do most stories have to be told under assumed names, posted for security’s sake by third parties in other countries.
Predictably, the folks who ran the jail took exception to Shaun’s extraordinary efforts to share his experiences with the world. I imagine that the authorities in the Dreyfus case objected to Émile Zola’s writing about that, too. But as my parents liked to point out approximately once every forty-two seconds throughout my excruciatingly literary childhood, that’s precisely what good writers are
supposed
to do, isn’t it?
If I approach this memoir as a book first and social commentary second, it is because I first encountered Shaun not as the prisoners’ rights advocate or anti-drug crusader he has since become, but as an aspiring writer struggling to transform his scarifying personal experiences into a memoir. My blog,
Author! Author!
(
www.annemini.com
), is devoted to helping new writers, so when Shaun began leaving comments about turning his fascinating-sounding prison blog into a book, I naturally went to check out
Jon’s Jail Journal
.
I have never recovered—nor, I think, shall I. Perhaps, as an American, I shouldn’t. A representative sample:
I am allowed out of my cell for one hour each day to make a phone call and to take a shower. During my first ‘hour out’ in the new pod, I was serenaded by the inmates, who performed a husky version of
Yellow Submarine
. I was touched by their demonstration of high spirits in a part of the jail known for extreme suffering…. A seventy-year-old downstairs became the first victim of the soaring temperatures. He was stretchered from the pod after suffering chest pains. Before he collapsed, he became delusional and made a variety of bizarre comments that disturbed his young cellmate:
‘Take me to the hospital so I can put on my clothes.’
‘Take me out to the desert and shoot me.’
‘Let’s go! Grab the key to the front door.’
‘I have a broken back. I can’t walk!’
A neighbour who is asthmatic happily described his experience with a cockroach that had crept into his inhaler during the night. When he woke up, he grabbed the inhaler and blasted the insect down his throat. Feeling the cockroach moving around, he promptly vomited his stomach contents. Unfortunately, the cockroach was not ejected, as it was lodged inside of him. He was subsequently awarded ‘sufferer of the week,’ a title I came up with to entertain my neighbours.
Intrigued by Shaun’s unusual combination of exposé and gallows humor—literally, in some cases—I emailed him right away, asking if he would be willing to write a guest post for my blog, an offer I seldom make to as-yet-unpublished writers. I was convinced that here was a story that my readers needed to hear. Who, after all, would understand the right of freedom of expression better than writers?
To be perfectly honest, though, even in my initial horrified enthusiasm to get some part of this story in front of readers right away, I had some reservations about it. I was worried about inadvertently sending a pro-drug message to my teenage readers; naturally, as someone who has lost several friends to drug addiction, that was the last thing I wanted to do. The more of his blog I read, however, and the more research I did, the more convinced I became that his is a profoundly anti-drug message—far more so than even the media take on his activities.
Arizona press back issues offered a wealth of information on English Shaun, the guy who revolutionized the ecstasy trade at Phoenix raves by, if the articles are correct, branding his proprietary drug mix with a Batman symbol so purchasers could be sure of what they were getting. Salesmen circulated at parties in Batman T-shirts, like band promoters hawking souvenirs at concerts or vendors pushing hot dogs at baseball games.
Yet words such as
empire
appear disturbingly often in these accounts, as if Shaun’s illegal efforts to rationalize a previously disorganized rave scene were somehow Napoleonic. Even the damning
New Times
article featuring a drawing of Shaun as a vampire preying on the youth of Phoenix—entitled, tellingly,
Evil Empire
—begrudgingly gave credit to his superlative organizational skills. So what message were these accounts actually sending young readers, other than wonder that anyone manage to remain pasty-faced in sun-drenched Phoenix?
I don’t approve of drug dealing, well-organized or otherwise, but frankly, I found these mixed messages perplexing. Nor do I approve of drug taking, although, on the whole, I believe that treatment is ultimately a more effective way to deal with drugs as both as a social and individual problem than the increased sentences mandated in pursuit of the so-called War on Drugs. I am not an expert on the subject, but here you are in luck: You have only to turn on the news to hear both sides argued passionately by people who know apparently far more (and, in some cases, evidently far less) about the issue than I.
But I also believe that wherever any U.S. citizen comes down in this debate, all of us recognize, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Jefferson, certain inalienable rights. The right to freedom of religion, for instance. So how could it not be inexpressibly disturbing for an American to read Shaun’s account of how only a fraction of a primarily Catholic inmate population was allowed to attend Mass?
While most of us are at least vaguely aware that many of felons’ constitutional rights are curtailed after conviction, every American fifth-grader knows that the United States was founded by people seeking a place to exercise their chosen religion free from state-sanctioned repression. (Actually, the profit-minded settlers of Virginia arrived on our shores a few years before the ultra-religious Pilgrims, but that would not make nearly so compelling an elementary school Thanksgiving pageant.)
If rights are the ability to enforce them, as Thomas Hobbes maintained, perhaps the very existence of this book should be regarded as a triumph of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, if rather a perverse one. Since his release, Shaun has kept
Jon’s Jail Journal
going, helping incarcerated writers get their voices heard, despite the fact that, in many cases, those writers do not have the requisite Internet access to see their own stories on the screen.
Nor, indeed, will most have access to Shaun’s memoir. A pity, because this is a story of rehabilitation and redemption in an environment where even the most naïve among us seldom expect to see either.
But that’s not the primary reason
Hard Time
will stick with you, I suspect, or why I found so many of its scenes indelibly burned into my mind. Regardless of where you fall on the lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key, let’s-try-to-rehabilitate-these-folks continuum, this is shocking stuff, as repellently fascinating as the scene of a car crash.
Unavoidably, this book begs the question: If the world did not know about this, why not? And now that, thanks to Shaun’s efforts, we in this country do know, what are we going to do about it?
—Anne Mini
