ROACH MOTEL
courtesy of Shaun Attwood
Shaun Attwood, a.k.a. "English Shaun," in a publicity still for his new book on Arpaio's jails.
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Dead rats in the evening slop. Cells so full of cockroaches that you sleep in a mass of them. No air-conditioning. Overcrowding. A lack of guards to watch the inmates. Violence and mayhem. White supremacists. And enough drugs to slake the appetites of Hermann Goering and Aleister Crowley, were they still alive.
If you've figured that I'm talking about Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jails, you've figured correctly, amigos. In that sense, Shaun Attwood's book Hard Time: A Brit in America's Toughest Jail will not undulate the eyebrows of those familiar with Arpaio's Amnesty International-condemned gulag archipelago.
Still, Attwood's hair-raising and oddly hilarious account of his two years in county stir is a reminder of the conditions that caused the deaths of Scott Norberg, Brian Crenshaw, Charles Agster, and numerous others, resulting in Arpaio being America's most sued sheriff and costing Maricopa County taxpayers more than $43 million in settlements and awards, at last count.
Attwood did his time mostly in Arpaio's Towers Jail after being arrested in 2002 for running a criminal enterprise known as the "evil empire," which dealt ecstasy and meth with more efficiency than a competing drug-trafficking syndicate operated by former John Gotti underboss Sammy "the Bull" Gravano.
Indeed, Attwood's exploits made the cover of New Times in July 2002, in an article that simultaneously caused his mother in England to have a nervous breakdown after she read it online and gave him massive street cred on the inside.
Ultimately, Attwood caught 91/2 years for his crimes, with credit for the two in Joe's joint. He served another three years in state pens in Buckeye, Florence, and Tucson before being deported back to England in 2007, courtesy of a loophole in the law allowing for his removal. He's now permanently barred from ever re-entering the United States.
Although the book, which was recently released in England and is available online through Amazon.co.uk, doesn't deal with his life in prison, he told me via phone from London that the difference between the Arizona Department of Corrections and Maricopa County facilities reminded him of varying pits of perdition.
"It's like Dante's Inferno," he related. "There are different degrees of Hell, and Arpaio's is the worst. People in the jail system who've been in the prison system, they sign plea bargains just so they can get out of the jail and into better conditions."
See, even though the state hoosegow is no coffee klatch, at least the swamp cooler works (unlike at Joe's place), the food is better, and it's actually safer, according to Attwood.
That's right, folks, those convicted of crimes are actually treated better in the state penitentiary than those simply accused of misdeeds and sitting untried in Arpaio's vast incarceration complex.
Those who don't toe the line of one of the race-based gangs that run the MCSO clink can expect to be beat down, or "smashed," in the parlance of the slammer. Brutal cage-match-type fights are commonplace. The loser often ends up carted away on a stretcher.
The detention officers get their licks in, too, usually when the place is put on lockdown and a beefy goon squad is dispatched to pummel someone into pudding. But Attwood makes the point that not all the bulls are beasts.
"Some of them were brutal," Attwood, now 42, said of the guards, "and some of them would talk to us and tell us that they didn't like Arpaio."
I'm guessing that many D.O.'s still hate Boss Hogg and company after the MCSO recently withheld $2 million in back pay from them. The U.S. Department of Labor finally stepped in and forced Maricopa County to cut 'em checks earlier this year. MCSO brass refused to distribute the checks. The county had to do that on its own.
As for the cruelty of some of his fellow inmates, Attwood told me it took a while before he became inured to it.
"The violence was so constant, I couldn't possibly put it all in the book," he said. "You have to get used to heads getting bashed against toilets and bodies getting thrown around."
Particularly menacing are the neo-Nazi thugs who usually head up the "woods," the Caucasian gang that all whites must belong to in the jails — or else.
Anyone who doubts Attwood's accounts of such violence need only look as far as the 2008 death of MCSO prisoner Robert Cotton, the video of which was first shown on KPHO. In it, Cotton's assailant, Pete Van Winkle, stomps on Cotton for 20 minutes before detention officers arrive.
Van Winkle eventually was convicted of first-degree murder. The county ended up settling with Cotton's family for $500,000.
Perhaps more disturbing than the bloodletting Attwood encounters is the fact that Arpaio's jails are awash in every kind of illicit drug imaginable, "keistered" in by the prisoners via their rectums.
The inmates are high all the time. One of Attwood's bunkmates openly deals meth and samples generously from his own supply. Prisoners pass needles around to shoot up heroin, and end up giving each other hepatitis C.
Observing all this had an ironic effect on Attwood, the former ecstasy kingpin.
