NOT SHUT UP

Shaun Attwood spent several years in prison in the United States. Hugh Stoddart met up with him at the reading of prisoners’ work during the recent Koestler exhibition. the title of this public event was NOT SHUT UP and was well attended! Shaun runs a blog jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com and hopes to publish his first book later this year

HUGH: What were the circumstances? How did you end up in a prison in the United States?
SHAUN: I was a normal young lad from a working class town in Cheshire – that was 20 years ago. I took my Business degree to Phoenix, Arizona and I became a stock market millionaire. I was a stockbroker gone wild. I also took my love of the Manchester rave scene with me and I started throwing rave parties out there. I started investing in ecstasy – I had people bringing it in and distributing it – so a SWAT team knocked my door down in May 2002. They arrested me, and over a hundred others. They said I was the ringleader as I was the guy with the money. I ended up on remand for 26 months in the jail system run by the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He’s the guy who makes his inmates wear pink boxer shorts and black and white bee-striped pyjamas, and feeds them green baloney and mouldy bread for breakfast. Arpaio was on George Bush’s steering committee at the time, so he’s one of the most powerful people in America. He’s an elected official and he’s still running the remand jail system. That was where the blog began. That’s when I started writing.  I then went on into the state prison system.

H: So the remand system is completely separate.
S: The word ‘jail’ refers to where you go when you’re on remand. After you’re sentenced then you go to ‘prison.’

H: There was no possibility of you getting bail?
S: My bail was set at $750,000 to begin with – cash only. There was a bond hearing and multiple family members and friends offered to put up their houses to make that figure, but then the bond ended up getting doubled – $1.5 million! Cash only!

H: They were determined to keep you locked up – I guess they thought you’d flee the country.
S: Look, I want to say in this interview, I put myself in jail. I committed the crimes. I take full responsibility. On the other hand, they really went after me: the prosecutor and detectives wanted to make names for themselves off my case. They went to the media right away. I was the cover story of a local newspaper – they did a portrait of me as Nosferatu with the title English Shaun’s Evil Empire – a ten page story.
H: They don’t worry about contempt of court do they?
S: No… Though actually the only motion my attorney won was a gag order – because the lead detective on the case and the prosecutor both contributed to that article.

H: A motion? That’s something argued in court?
S: In America only a very small percentage of cases go to trial – it’s virtually unheard of. What they do is dangle a massive sentence over you – mine in the beginning was 200 years. They come down over a period of time. Your attorney fights all this by filing motions. And the prosecutor is filing motions and the judge is making rulings. And this sentence range you’re facing is going up and down in accordance with these rulings.

H: That’s what they call plea bargaining?
S: Right. You’re entitled to a fair trial but they make it very clear that if you go to trial your charges will be stacked. That means every charge they find you guilty of – every single thing you’re supposed to have done – will be added up into one sentence and that way you can end up with one of these triple digit sentences.
H: So you effectively have no opportunity to assert your innocence?
S: No. But of course I wasn’t innocent. Far from it.

H: But that’s not the point. I mean, if someone chooses to plead not guilty they’re entitled to a trial. That’s what one would expect…
S: But I saw people claim they were innocent – cases where I’d say there was a very high probability of them being innocent – and they would refuse to sign any plea bargains because they said ‘I’m not going to confess to something I didn’t do.’ These people would be offered say five years as a plea bargain, and with the time served on remand they’d have been out pretty quickly. But they’d go to trial and inevitably lose, and the judge would say, ‘Oh, right, you’ve said you’re innocent, which means you’re not showing any remorse, so I’m going to give you the maximum sentence. ’ Then he’d stack up all the charges. I saw that happen to an abortion doctor: he was accused of molesting his patients and he maintained he was innocent. He refused to accept a bargain of five years. He ended up with 30 plus years. He was getting on – it meant his life was over, effectively.

H: So what happened in your case?
S: My parents had to put up a lot of money for my attorney – my father cashed in his retirement pension – but the attorney got me a sentence of nine and a half years and because I was a first time offender and non-violent, I was eligible for an earlier release for non-US citizens. I got out after doing just under six. It’s called a ‘loophole.’

H: You’ve gone through a huge shift in your fortunes.
S: At the peak of it all I had a million dollar house on a mountainside – it was beautiful. I had a fleet of cars, apartments all over the place, my girlfriend and I would jump on a plane and go clothes shopping in LA whenever we wanted… but I was materialistic, a hedonist, a narcissist. I was emotionally immature… I think I had to go through all this to mature, to become a different person. Then, after I got out of prison, I was deported. I’m banned from America for life. If I did go back, I’d have to serve the rest of my sentence and more time for having entered the country.

H: How did you put your life back together?
S: I was released in December 2007. The blog began in 2004. How that came about was, I was writing letters to my family and to my friends about the conditions in the jail and they were saying, ‘This is amazing. What’s going on is horrific!’ – and you know, they wanted to know more… And I found I was saying the same things in each letter. My dad had read the book by Salam Pax – The Blogger of Baghdad.  He’d started his blog while the bombs were raining down on Iraq.  And so we started a blog. Because guards were killing so many prisoners a year in that jail, and being found guilty in court for it, we set up the blog in the name ‘Jon’ so there’d be no retribution on me. I used this little pencil – a golf pencil.  Anything longer was banned as a potential weapon. I’d sharpen it on the cell wall. I’d be sitting in my pink boxer shorts with sweat pouring off me writing these things. I’d have bedsores on my behind and I’m sitting on a little stool – that’s how it was.

H: So how did you get your writing out?
S: I had family and friends there – that’s how I came to go to Arizona in the first place. My aunt visited me every weekend and she’d smuggle them out. She’d then email them home to my parents and they’d post them to the Jon’s Jail Journal. There were very few hits at the time, but then The Guardian ran excerpts and then the BBC picked up on it, and so the readership really expanded. Through that growing interest, I got a literary agent. As I was in prison and communication was difficult, she worked for three years with my sister, Karen, who is a journalist: half the book was the blogs and half was about my case and the effect on my family. By the time I got out of prison – I’m soon meeting the agent, she’s popping the champagne, the book’s finalised, we’re taking it to a book fair. I thought I was set to have a career as an author. A week before the London Book Fair, my agent was diagnosed with cancer and few months later she’s died. She was only 41; it was an absolute tragedy.

H: And everything stopped?
S: I tried submitting the manuscript to publishers, but they said the dual narrative didn’t work, didn’t like this, didn’t like that – rejection after rejection. I was getting depressed. I felt I was just banging my head against a brick wall. Then I get this phone call from Prisoners Abroad saying I’ve won first prize for a short story I wrote in prison: it’d been sent by them into the Koestler Trust. It was called Amazing Grace. It was about a shit slinger – an inmate who does exactly that. So I came to London and read that story at the Royal Festival Hall – 2008 – and the Koestler people told me about their mentor programme. I applied and got accepted, and I was assigned Sally Hinchcliffe, who’s a novelist and short story writer. She’s been great – tough but just right for me. She made me write my entire life story. She wanted me to use my own way of saying things, have my own voice, but our goal was to up the standard of my writing, to cut back on the excesses in it. I’d been on the scheme six months and already we had literary agents competing to take me on.

H: So that’s been crucial?
S: It’s transformed everything. I was able to pick and choose and I’m now with an agent and he’s just recently submitted part of my life story – the jail memoir – to publishers. But whatever happens, I’ve fallen in love with writing and I’m going to continue with it. I’ve also got some work with The McLellan Practice, going into schools to talk about drugs.

H: Most of the people I’ve talked to say how prison has marked them, changed them. I guess that, as a writer, you can use that experience now – so that the fact you have been in prison is both a part of what you are but also part of what you can use, the source of your work.
S: Everything you’ve ever been through in your life has made you what you are today – you can’t change that. But you can choose your attitude towards it: you can be happy about it, or you can be miserable about it. You can look back and use it as a source of strength, or you can look back and say ‘I went through this and I’m going to let it hold me down.’ I’m not going to do that. I know it’s tough out there, but there are success stories – people who have been in prison and who experience the prejudices, the rejection, but they just keep on going. If you don’t let it hold you back, you can get there. n

Shaun’s first book is to be published later this year, but his blog is well established
www.jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com