The Difference Between Prison and Mental Hospital

In prison, for starters, they hand you a job. If you are sensible and wise, as I was (humble brag), you can get yourself a job on the wing. This means you don’t have to spend the whole day too far away from your cell. I myself was given a role doing the laundry. It was one day on, one day off. All it meant was using the washing machine every 45 minutes or so. The laundry room was on the 1^st floor, so I was happy to be up and down every other day, keeping fit. I would prioritise my boys and other people I liked, and maybe even fold their clothes all nicely as a warm gesture. The position commanded a certain amount of respect itself, as clothes are a prisoner’s most valued possessions. Aside from work, there were plenty of things to be occupied with on the wing. The job also got me off the wing and over to the industrial laundry unit on the other side of the jail. This involved a peaceful stroll around the whole prison grounds. Ping pong, pool and snooker were standard procedure on each and every single wing. There was an education suite available, with plenty of computers for writing letters on or whatnot, plus there was a library too, with warm-hearted welcoming staff who enjoyed a game of scrabble. A full-size artificial field, with nets, was there for highly competitive inter-wing matches. If you didn’t fancy a game, and you had a pitch-side window in your cell, you could watch the action. There was a chapel, where prisoners from all over met for courses and prayer. Basically, jail was a huge complex with several acres to explore. And let’s not forget a fully-equipped gymnasium and sports hall, where weightlifting, badminton and even yoga classes were on offer. All of these activities can be engaged with on a daily basis. Sometimes I would get to the gym twice a day. There was also the social aspect as well. With hundreds of people on a single wing, you were always meeting new people. Some of them were friendly faces. There was no shortage of laughs or gossip or incidents. And, finally, you had a release date. Something to look forward to.

In hospital, you are cocooned with a dozen other drug-pumped zombies on a claustrophobic ward, and that’s it. Where would you rather be?

SIP OF YOUR BREW....GOT ANY DIMPS? by Dixie

FLASH: Prison

Introducing The Blue-Eyed Monster. Based on actual events. Dixie once argued with another prisoner who was seated by standing up, turning the other way, and opening his ass cheeks as he talked, like a tranquiloquist using his own rear as a puppet. Dixie also loved to make fun of the petty thieves who, in his own words, do the ‘cheese run in Kwik Save’ followed by the ‘bacon run in Asda’. “One pulled me up in the street one time and asked if I wanted to buy any chocolate,” he says. “Not an iPod, not a PS3 game, but chocolate.”

He shuffled into my cell like it was his and plonked himself down on my bed. He asked me for a sip of my brew.

Of all the many requests, can I have a sip of your brew was the hardest to cope with. The first time it happened, my face must have told its own story, until dreamily I passed him my tea and dreamily I received it back. In between this transaction, and also very dreamily, I watched him slurp from a plastic mug that up until that moment throughout my 2 moon sentence had seen no other lips touch it apart from my own. Not one slurp, not two slurps, but three slurps. Instead of simply tilting the cup back to take a drink like any normal person, he sucked the liquid up into his mouth, as if he had an invisible straw.

Next, he asked if I had any dimps. For those who may not know, dimps, or dockers, are leftover fag ends, or ciggy butts. I’d seen my fair share of tramps ‘ducking for dockers’ outside the local Bingo entrance or ‘stockpiling stumps’ in the bus depo, but to have a grown trash-ass wasteman in prison regularly invading my private space to clear out my ashtray was all new to me.

It was have you got this and give us that and can I have this and lend me that. On you, after you, twos on, saves....on anything that could be eaten, drank or smoked. Not to mention toiletries. I was beginning to feel like a walking dispenser. Snickers, milk, sugar....the lot

We called him The Blue-Eyed Monster, although never to his face, because apart from his big wet childish blue eyes, he looked like a cross between Uncle Fester from The Adams Family and Dr Frankenstein’s monster from Frankenstein. His eyes were actually like a puppy dog’s eyes and he had a cute, lovable grin. What worked against him was the creasy forehead high enough to strike matches on and a shaved head so close to the bone that it looked like a surgeon with a bloodlust had run riot all over it. I mean I had aclose buzz cut, but his was ridiculous.

He had one of those rumpled, rippled scalps that looked like his brain-sac was halfway done bustin' out through his skull, with enough neck and back hair to make even the most experienced barber wonder where to draw the line.

Unlike me, he was due out in a few weeks, after freeloading himself silly on my grub. His plan was to set up tent in the woods until a tugboat on the canal ‘became available for salvage’. He had circled the tent he wanted in the Argos catalogue with a red pen and run me through the whole plan of action last night when I’d been busy trying to watch Are You Fitter Than A Pensioner? Camp out, salvage a tugboat, and grow his own spuds in a vegetable patch. Easy as abc, except for the fact that he couldn’t grow a beard without assistance. Besides, one probe into them manky ears of his with a cotton bud would yield all the spuds he would likely ever need.

Despite hogging the end shower as if he’d fallen asleep in it, facing the wall with his XXL forehead pressed against the water release button, he never scrubbed them waxy lobes out. Thinking of it, he never even cleansed himself unless he’d bummed some shower gel from me. He just stood there rooted to the spot like a naughty kid ordered to stand under a water fountain. Nobody ever bullied him for hygiene because all he had to do was stumble in the wrong direction and someone would be getting squashed.

Watching him suddenly shift into motion for the dinner line was alarming, and the height of the mountain of croquette potatoes on his plate the other day was nothing short of daft. Other cons were pulling faces and calling him a horrible greedy guts with disdain usually reserved for molesters and rapists. I wished I had a camera. The size of it!

This has been me talking about The Blue-Eyed Monster, and he was the man who asked for a sip of my brew.

© Dixie MMX
Blob of Glob™

Shaun Attwood Interview

HARD TIME, by Shaun Attwood

Born in Widnes. Educated at Liverpool University. Stockbroker in the US. Rave organiser in the US. Sent to the toughest jail in the US....Arizona’s Maricopa Jail is run by the notorious Sherriff Joe Arpaio, who feeds his prisoners on 30 cents a day. He openly brags about feeding the dogs on 60 cents a day because the dogs “are working for a living and haven’t committed any crimes”. He makes the prisoners wear pink underwear and bee-stripe coveralls in chain gangs. Some of them live in tents. The illegal conditions include infested cells where the cockroaches crawl all over you in sweltering heat and a bloodlike carroty slop for dinner known as “red death” in which the origins of the meat content are questionable, to say the least.

~

It’s all about race and gangs. The Aryan Brotherhood, Blacks, Mexicans and alike will kill-on-sight (KOS) for an initiation tattoo and don’t expect the guards to rush to your rescue, because they are known for murdering inmates too. Shaun Attwood exposed the truth by smuggling out his diary extracts written with a golf pencil sharpened on the wall and having his family upload it to the web, creating jonsjailjournal.com to international acclaim. HARD TIME is his first book, and is now available on Amazon.

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Question 1

I like your choice of understated sports cars such as the Toyota Supra and twin turbo Mazda RX7. What would your ideal vehicle be at the moment?

~

S.A

My ideal vehicle at the moment is my old Ford Fiesta, which gets me to the schools I do my talks to and back. Supposedly, Mazda is designing a new RX7 for 2011.

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Question 2

Doing bulk deals of quality Ecstasy on foreign soil must have been exciting at the time. What you were doing is worlds apart, in my view, from the modern climate of nasty legal high shipments, or shady crack and smack transactions. If you were a judge, would you show sympathy to the raver?

~
S.A

If I were a judge in America I would not be able to show much sympathy due to the statutory sentencing framework. Historically, judges have been more lenient in the UK, but unfortunately we are adopting more US legal practices.

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Question 3

Reading about how you were living on the odd Snickers made me crave Snickers. Do you still munch Snickers, are you totally revolted by Snickers, or can you take ‘em or leave ‘em?

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S.A

As soon as I got out of prison, I stopped eating some of the items that had sustained me throughout my incarceration. Snickers, peanut butter, milk...

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Question 4

Did the infamous Sherriff Joe Arpaio show his face much about the jail?
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S.A

Not often. When he did, he was surrounded by his own personal "goon squad" - armed bodyguards in shankproof armour. The inmates would hurl abuse at him from their cells - something you never see on his carefully-staged jail documentaries.

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Question 5

I can’t imagine your low points in Joe’s Hole when looking at the prospect of life imprisonment. I know you meditated in yoga positions by visualising triangles around your body and imagining your spine as a shaft of light (or something like that), but did you ever actually pray directly to God?
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S.A

I regularly attended the church services, where we all prayed and sang together. The best services were hosted by Jumping Bill!

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Question 6

Has surviving on rations of spoiled food increased your appetite for supermarket treats/fast food/takeaways, or has it instilled in you a discipline to be more rigorous with your diet now?
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S.A

After the "red death" jail slop with occasional dead rats in it, I am still a yoga practicing vegetarian.

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Question 7

Has been exposed to so much violence, like heads getting cracked like coconuts on the floor, for example, edged you towards a more pacifist standpoint?
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S.A

Yes.

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Question 8

Who is the character in Hard Time you would least like to share a hotel room with, and why?
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S.A

Someone like Bullet, a neo Nazi and a murderer, who wanted to kidnap his prosecutor, torture her with a blow torch, and murder her.

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Question 9

What is the most unorthodox object, or largest quantity of contraband/merchandise, you were ever aware of someone unpacking from their ass (keystering)?
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S.A

The mules prided themselves on how much they could "keyster" (pack in their behinds). Some of them bragged that they could store four "quarter roll" packages without them peeking out during the strip searches. A quarter roll refers to something the size of $10 worth of 25 cent coins placed one on top of the other.

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Question 10

After you have completed the English Shaun trilogy with the upcoming prequel and sequel to Hard Time, do you see yourself staying in the writing business with any other works?
~

S.A

I'd like to write the individual stories of some of the prisoners featured at my blog like Wild Man, Two Tonys, T-Bone, Frankie...

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Questions by Andrew Donegan, who read with Shaun at the Royal Festival Hall in London 2009.

Inside Art

Titles from top:

Molten Outreach, by Serb Zero and Hubble telescope.

Assorted personalities in a drug induced wisteria reality, by Steve Twigg, Ye Hao Yan and Anonymous person.

My Art Teacher before Prism Negative 1, by Lee Timperley and Anonymous person.

Portrait of Queen Elizabeth II within Earthly Delight, by Paul M'Kali and Anonymous person.

These are reproduced from the 2010 official Koestler handbook. Koestler is the UK's biggest and best Arts Charity, and a Godsend for any creative person behind bars, or for anyone in a secure unit. It expanded to Manchester for the first time this year, previously exclusive to London and Edinburgh, and exhibited in the Holden Gallery, a university area full of hip babes and funky chicks, which I adore. What gets me though is how people remain anonymous, and allow a cool piece of work to go out without a name. Sometimes, when 'in the zone', I feel like I have to sign my toilet roll before I flush it (I even use ink now and again). Men are like dogs, spraying their scent all over the show and claiming pockets of territory to stick a sign on. We dream of our names in big letters. I don't understand 'Anon'. Make up a pen name!

Note: The above images are mixtures of 7 separate entries.

Shaun Attwood's HARD TIME

This book is an account of the 26 months Shaun Attwood spent in the jail system with the highest rate of death in America. The jail is in Phoenix, Arizona, and run by the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio. It begins with a SWAT team knocking Shaun’s door down, and his arrest for heading an organisation that threw raves and distributed club drugs. Initially, Shaun goes into shock as he’s submerged into a nightmarish world of gang violence, insect-infested cells and food unfit for animals. But with the love and support of his family and fiancée, Claudia, he slowly adapts.

Other prisoners Shaun meets on his journey tell their stories. His large and fearless friend since childhood, Wild Man, pops up all over the place with his unique brand of chaos. Shaun’s situation devastates his loved ones, and his mother has a nervous breakdown. The prosecutor and Detective Reid are out to get Shaun a life sentence, and the legal developments cause many emotional ups and downs.

Over time, Shaun tries to avoid getting smashed by forming various alliances, including with the Italian Mafia and the independent tough guy, Joe. Shaun increasingly uses jail time for learning and introspection. He takes up yoga, and ponders the big questions in philosophy. The letters he writes home, which make his family both laugh and cry, tell such a graphic tale that his parents encourage him to write more in order to document his incarceration.

Towards the end of his stay and with the help of his family, he starts the blog, Jon’s Jail Journal, to expose the conditions and human rights violations. The book ends with his family flying over from England for a sentencing hearing that has everyone on the verge of mental collapse.

Shaun’s jail memoir is slated for September-October 2010 publication in the UK.

Shaun’s award-nominated blog, jonsjailjournal.com, big in the U.S, has given a great many number of prisoners a voice, whose stories otherwise would have remained unheard. Mentored by Koestler, and publicly speaking in schools and prisons, this inspiring Widnesian continues to head a major movement.