'It was a hotbed of violence'

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Wednesday August 1st 2007

British stockbroker Shaun Attwood spent two years in the Maricopa County Jail system for money laundering and drugs offences. Here, he shares his experiences of human rights abuses in the US prison system run by the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Wednesday August 1st 2007

Photograph: www.flickr.com/photos/insunlight/

Cockroaches swarmed my body at nights during the twenty-six months I spent in the Maricopa County jail system in Phoenix, Arizona – an experience that put an end to my ignorance of human rights.

Housing consisted of sharing a squalid insect-infested cell with up to two people. Other than the cockroaches that dominated the environment, mosquitoes and spiders were prevalent. ‘Brown Recluse’ spiders roamed while we slept. I saw many of their bite wounds: volcanic lesions that caused tissue to slough away, leaving sunken ulcerated sores. As the jail refused to treat insect bites, I sometimes helped inmates squeeze out pus and salt the wounds.

Each day two meals were provided. The man running the jail system, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of George W. Bush’s Steering Committee, regularly appeared on television boasting how it costs a pittance to feed the inmates – less than the animals he shelters. (More recently he claimed the fines he receives for providing food past its sell-by date are less than the cost savings the jail makes.) Breakfast, known as ‘Ladmo bags’ was usually mouldy bread, green bologna, processed cheese that quickly melted into oil, and fruit collected from rat-infested neighbourhoods (publicity stunts for Arpaio). The evening meal was a ‘mystery-meat’ slop. Most common was ‘red death’. The inmates nicknamed another ‘Kibbles ’n Bits’.

Slop ingredients included animal and human hair. And one evening, a rat’s head and body, apparently boiled with the slop, were served. The vegetables du jour were rotten potato peelings and leathery eggplant. The permanent states of hunger caused inmates to forage in trashcans, and to inflict harm on each other over insignificant amounts of food.

The jail’s system was a hotbed of violence. Racial segregation and extortion rackets were enforced by an inmate thugocracy that held daily kangaroo courts and instructed certain inmates called ‘torpedoes’ to ‘smash’ people. I’ll never forget what a head sounds like when it’s repeatedly bashed against a steel toilet; or the screams for mercy and inevitable silence as a person is beaten unconscious; or the images of bodies, hospital-bound on stretchers leaking blood. When race riots flared up we were all tear-gassed indiscriminately.

Other than when health inspectors were present, the cells received a trickle of swamp-cooled air. When outdoor temperatures approached 120 degrees, I stewed in my own sweat, cultivating bedsores, pinkeye, and various skin infections, some of which looked like sulphuric acid burns. Because of the heat and constant cockroach attacks, I had to take medication in order to sleep.

Because of the conditions and the propensity of his staff to beat inmates up and leave them to die in restraint chairs, Arpaio has become the most sued Sheriff in the United States. Guidelines for minimum living conditions for the jail system were established in the case Hart v Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, yet Arpaio continues to flagrantly violate the ruling of the court.

The jail system seemed to be a means of torturing unsentenced inmates into signing plea bargains, (approximately 95 per cent of cases in the US do not go to trial). Trial dates were set for trials that never happened. Prosecutors issued threats of life imprisonment if plea bargains weren’t signed. At a bond hearing, my attorney argued that a $750,000 cash-only bond for a first-time non-violent drug offender violated my right to a reasonable bond. Following the hearing my bond was doubled to $1.5 million cash-only. The court system did not appear to be resistant to manipulation by the vast resources of the state.

Many inmates, including those claiming innocence, signed plea bargains just to be transferred to the prison system where conditions were more tolerable. After my three trial dates were cancelled, after two years of being starved of food, fresh air, and sunlight, I showed up in court, looking like what my family members later described as a ‘concentration-camp survivor. That was the day I gave the prosecutor what she wanted: I signed a plea bargain.

• Shaun Attwood is no longer under Sheriff Arpaio’s jurisdiction. He should be eligible for parole in November. Read more at his blog.

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