On Tuesday the 27th of September 2016 I was lucky enough to experience a talk by Shaun Attwood on life in prison. Shaun Attwood was a dedicated student who went to university and got a degree; however, after leaving university he was faced with searching for a job during Britain’s recession. Luckily (or unluckily), he had family in Arizona who offered him a place to stay in an area with more job prospects.
He moved to Arizona, got a job as a stockbroker and by his mid-late 20s Attwood was already a millionaire. As an adrenaline junky he yearned for a way to spend his money on things which would give him a rush. After speaking with some friends back in Manchester he began holding raves in his mountainside mansion.
Along with the raves came the drugs; ecstasy, speed and cocaine. Attwood soon became hooked on the feeling of drugs and the attention which came with the drugs, and so, he soon moved from a user to a distributor. For years he got away with dealing to colleagues and teenagers over the phone. Until May 16th 2002, when the apartment he was staying in was raided and he was arrested. Thus began his long ride through the Arizona criminal justice system.
Despite being a millionaire Attwood could not pay his bail of $0.75 million as all of his assets were seized upon arrest; and so, he spent two years in Maricopa County Jail in the towers jail section (which is next to famous tent city jail) prior to sentencing, where Attwood pleaded guilty for a sentence of nine and a half years.
Attwood went on to tell us graphic stories about the Maricopa jail, run by Joe Arpaio. The conditions are awful, the food they are served is mouldy bread and leftover meat which has a green sheen, named ‘red death’ by the inmates. There is a huge divide between races; white, black, Mexican, Mexican-American and because of these divides gang violence is huge. But it is not just prisoners fighting, and sometimes killing, it is also wardens beating and killing prisoners. Attwood told Erwin James from the guardian “Sheriff Joe has paid out tens of millions of dollars in damages to the people who have died in his jails, at the hands of the guards, at the hands of other prisoners, or died of medical negligence, such as diabetics who needed their medicine. Sometimes sex offenders were streamed discreetly into the main population, but the guards would tell the prisoners who they were and then it was KOS [Kill on Sight] or SOS [Smash on Sight].”
There are infestations of cockroaches and brown recluse spiders, the bites of which would get infected and the flesh would be eaten away leaving exposed bone. Also, the temperatures in the Arizona desert are frequently above 40 degrees Celsius during the summer months with no operating coolers in the jail. These high temperatures lead to constant sweating meaning the inmates’ skin was constantly saturated and itchy which often caused fungal and bacterial infections as well as the skin to rot and fall off when scratched.
Attwood’s story is fascinating and you can find out more by watching his episode of ‘banged up abroad: raving Arizona’ or read one of his many books.
I was enthralled by his talk, the message of which was clearly ‘do not get into drugs’. But what struck me more was the clear corruption of the Arizona criminal justice system.
Attwood spoke of his fellow inmate, “T-Bone”, a spiritual ex-marine who uses his formidable fighting skills to protect vulnerable inmates from prison rape (from Attwood’s website: John’s jail journal). T-Bone’s story is he became a bodyguard when he returned from being a marine. He told Vice magazine in 2014 “the cash started rolling in. I invested in the cocaine business and got addicted to it. I’ve lost over 20 years of my life due to the dumb decisions I made on drugs. I’ve hurt my wife and children by putting myself in here.”
So T-Bone admits taking drugs. However, T-Bone’s current sentence is for robbery, which he claims he is innocent of. He is serving 13 years for a crime he claims he did not commit, I cannot imagine how demoralising that must be with a wife and children waiting at home. His sentence leads me to the first problem with the criminal justice system: it is racist. Taken from the Arizona state robbery laws and penalties website “generally, [robbery] is a Class 4 felony charge, carrying 18 months to 3 years in prison”. So how did T-Bone get sentenced for 13 years? Even armed robbery “is classified as a Class 2 felony and carries 4 to 10 years in prison.” Even with past drug offences, his sentence could not increase by ten years.
Well, a reason for this may be that T-Bones family is poor – they can’t even afford a car to visit him in prison – so they couldn’t afford a defence lawyer for T-Bone’s court case. Therefore, T-bone was given a state appointed attorney. Apparently, these state appointed lawyers are appalling. Shaun Attwood’s state appointed attorney even wrote his original sentence down incorrectly, which meant he had to spend a year in super maximum security prison with a cellmate who said he had a lock in a sock, which he would use to smash in Attwood’s kneecaps at any time.
So T-Bone’s attorney did not care if it was a fair trial or not and the jury and judge most likely would discriminate against T-Bone and vote for an unfairly long sentence. Article ten of the declaration of human rights states: “Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.” If race was a factor in T-Bone’s trial then the Arizona criminal justice system could be accused with violating his human rights, a serious offence in itself.
The second problem with prison that Attwood mentioned was that drugs are more abundant in prison than out of prison. This means that young people get arrested for possession of petty drugs, e.g. weed, and then in prison they get hooked on harder drugs because of peer pressure from their racial gangs and then leave prison in a worse state than before. How is that reformation? Also, because the inmates become addicted to a wider range of drugs in prison, once they have served their sentence and are released, the chances are they will return to prison pretty quickly for worse crimes than before. statistics show that within six months of release 28% of inmates get rearrested for a new crime, after three years, the figure rises to 68% and after five years, it hits 77%.
Returning to T-Bone, he said “Every time I’ve been released, I’ve come straight back. I’m not making excuses for myself, but most prisoners have drug problems and the prisons offer no help, drug counselling or rehabilitation. The system is designed so that prisoners come right back because it keeps the prison in business.”
The last sentence intrigued me. Do prisons receive more funding if they have higher numbers of prisoners?
I found a 2008 article by New York and Global research titled ‘the prison industry in the United States’, which had some interesting statistics. The figures show that the United States has imprisoned more people than any other country: half a million more than China, which has a population five times greater. The United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s total population. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country; now, there are 100.
Whilst in prison, inmates have the opportunity to work for minimal amounts of money. They get paid usually less than minimum wage (sometimes 20 cents per hour) and can choose to send the money to their family and friends or buy ‘luxuries’ in prison. However, there is almost no doubt that some of the inmates’ wages will be intercepted by the prison coordinators.
Because of the cheap labour corporations are happy to employ prisoners. In fact, the contracting of prisoners for work creates incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work subtly campaign for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The corporations do not have to worry about strikes, unemployment insurance or paid leave because all of their workers are full-time, will never arrive late and cannot complain for fear of being put into isolation.
More importantly, private prisons receive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, despite what it costs to host each one. The prison industry in america is a $80 billion industry. To make prisons as profitable as possible sheriff’s ensure minimal number of guards for maximum number of prisoners. For example, the CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), the largest private prison company in america, has five guards during the day and two at night to watch over 750 prisoners in a jail in Virginia. In these prisons, for any misbehaviour, inmates get 30 days added to their sentence, which means more profits for the CCA.
Moving on to another issue with prison, 1 in 3 prisoners have hepatitis C. Shared make-shift needles for delivering drugs, used shanks (stabbing weapons formed from anything inmates can find), self-made tattoo needles, and unprotected sex all spread the illness. Hepatitis C is a death sentence, and yet, when the prisoners were offered Hep C medication on an account that they would stop taking drugs, they claimed would rather live a short life with drugs, to mask the pain of imprisonment, than live a longer and healthier life but being more aware the awful conditions of imprisonment.
After leaving prison, hepatitis can still consume your life; it can ruin your liver if combined with drugs and alcohol and render you not fit for work.
Furthermore, mental health is a huge problem with prisons. 16% of the country’s 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness. There are 3x more seriously mentally ill people in jails and prisons than there are in hospitals in the United States. This shocking statistic shows how important rehabilitation of prisoners is. It will be harder for mentally ill prisoners to reform and stay out of prison once released as they may not have the capacity to change without medical help which is not provided in prison without a fee.
Likewise, after prison it can be impossible to get your life back on track. In a survey by Institute for research on poverty it was discovered that over 40 percent of employers indicated that they would “probably” or “definitely” not be willing to hire an applicant with a criminal record for a job, which does not require a degree. If an ex offender cannot get a job their life will enter a spiral of decline with no income leading to a poor quality of life and depression, which could entice people to commit further crimes, such as possession of drugs or theft in order to afford living costs or numb the pain of deprivation.
In summary, the 5 aims of punishment- retribution, vindication, protection, reformation, deterrence – do not all seem to be being fulfilled in the american criminal justice system. Retribution, yes, vindication, maybe, but protection, reformation and deterrence, it seems certainly not.
As for Shaun Attwood, despite being back in England, living a life of peace and educating young adults, he is still greatly affected by his time in Arizona’s criminal justice system. To this day he flinches when people touch his hand because of the memories of cockroaches, to this day his mother takes medication for anxiety, to this day prisoners are living in inhumane conditions, to this day the utterly corrupt criminal justice system in Arizona is turning young adults into full-blown criminals by imprisoning them.
Bibliography (not a full one just a list of websites I gathered information from)
https://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis/hcv/pdfs/hepcincarcerationfactsheet-bw.pdf
http://www.vice.com/read/undercover-in-americas-privitised-prisons-alexander-reynolds-293
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-10985113
I have been told that Shaun Attwood’s books are very interesting and a great read. Here are a list of them to consider:
Party time (2013)
Hard time (1st edition 2010, 2nd edition 2014)
Learning in Parallel 