 | |
| This group stayed behind asking questions |
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| With Beth and Luke |
Rivington and Blackrod High School Visit, Bolton
 | |||||
| I was delighted to see that the students made this after my last visit. |
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| A student, Harry, changed his ID to T-Bone. |
Tony Lester
Tragic video of guards watching a mentally ill inmate bleed to death in Arizona: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/20130222tony-lester-doc-video.html?nclick_check=1
Locked-Up Abroad: 'Raving Arizona' with Shaun Attwood (Trailer)
The trailer for my Locked-Up/Banged Up Abroad episode just came out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlz6v2U7Cpo
1: Shaun Attwood Questioned By Psychology Students
This clip is the first from an hour I recently spent answering questions at Priors Field School, Godalming, Surrey.
Question Time
Hi
Shaun,
I'm
from Steyning Grammar School, today for my PSHE lesson I had an assembly with
you, talking about your amazing story. I was so interested in what you had to
say and thought it was incredibly horrifying. Although, you along with T-Bone
did inspire me a great deal. I wanted to thank you a hell of a lot for coming
in and sharing with us, it made me feel extremely lucky to be me. I have
subscribed to your YouTube channel, liked your Facebook page and seen your
website. I saw that you have a book telling more stories and I am planning to
actually buy a copy! I've always thought that media was showing prisons to be
nothing like they really are and you have defiantly exposed this. I think you
are the most respectful, inspiring and brave man I have met. I just have a few questions
I would like to ask:
Again,
thank you so, so much for coming in. You have inspired me so much.
Ali
Ali,
I’m
glad that my talk and T-Bone’s story inspired you a great deal. I always enjoy
visiting Steyning Grammar School. Here are my answers to your questions:
What
were your first actions/thoughts as you came out of the prison?
I
was wondering what the free world was going to be like, and if I’d be able to
cope after following prison rules for so long. I was excited, but nervous, and
disorientated from being in transportation for three days with hardly any
sleep. It was wonderful to see my mum, dad and sister at the airport, and to be
able to hug them. We went for Indian food, but I was unable to eat meat after
converting to vegetarianism in the jail where I couldn’t eat the mystery-meat
slop known as red death. For the first few days, just walking down the street,
I felt like I was in heaven. I’d stare at shop windows amazed. Being able to
choose and buy my own food and clothes thrilled me no end. With no noisy guards
and prisoners around, I slept for about 13 hours, but kept waking up wondering
when the guards were going to announce “chow time.” Having lost everything, I
appreciate the small things people take for granted. In many ways, prison did
me a lot of good.
How did you come out of prison in the end and
when did you?
I
was released and deported to London in December 2007 because I’d finished the
amount of time I had to serve.
How
long were you imprisoned for?
I
was in prison for 5¾ years.
Did
you ever have suicidal thoughts when inside or out? (You do not have to answer
that)
Suicidal
thoughts helped me get through many an anxious night when I was facing a 200 year
sentence. Such thoughts gave me a sense of control over a situation in which I
felt helpless. I had a way out: I could always end my life rather than spend
the rest of it locked up. But I couldn’t bear the thought of my family and
girlfriend being told that I was dead. Looking at their photos gave me the
strength not to kill myself.
What
were your family's reaction when you were arrested?
My
mum can answer your question best right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mup6EK329q0
What
do you do now as the criminal record would of obstructed many career
opportunities?
Writing
and doing talks keep me busy. Because no firm would hire me due to my criminal
record, I went self-employed. I consider myself lucky because I really enjoy
what I do. I used to be all about making money, but I learnt the hard way that
my success-at-all-costs attitude was soul destroying. It’s what we’re worth
inside that counts, and that means maintaining friendships and helping
people.
I
hope you remain inspired and do well in life.
Shaun
Attwood
Click
here for the previous Question Time: http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/question-time_9.html
Prison Blogging - Shaun Attwood Interviews Shannon Clark Part 2
Shannon talks about the murder of a mentally ill inmate whose penis was sliced off by his cellmate, and more about the perils of prison blogging.
Click here for Part 1
Steyning Grammar School Visit
 |
| With Troy and Sam pulling his best prison face |
 |
| Add caption |
Prison Blogging - Shaun Attwood Interviews Shannon Clark Part 1
Eight years ago, I met Shannon Clark in an Arizona prison, a non-violent offender, serving almost a dozen years for robbing $800-worth of goods that were later returned to their owner by the police. In 2005, I introduced him to Jon’s Jail Journal as “Shane” and started posting stories about him to the Internet. Fascinated by the concept of blogging, Shannon spent hours in my cell, pouring over print-outs of my old blog entries. Endlessly, we debated blogging and discussed my blog readers’ comments. By the end of 2005, and with outside help, Shannon managed to launch his own blog, Persevering Prison Pages, which has championed human rights and attracted media attention.
For speaking out, the prison came down hard on Shannon. His good time was pulled, effectively extending his sentence by a year, and in the past year he was moved from prison to prison five times. Getting moved is extremely stressful and disruptive. Despite this, and in defiance of senior prison staff, Shannon kept blogging. He’s a brave soul indeed.
Shannon was recently released, so I interviewed him about the perils of prison blogging. Part 1 of the audio is in the YouTube video.
Shannon is now living happily in a house with his new girlfriend from the UK, who originally found out about him through Jon’s jail Journal.
Shaun Attwood
Crawley Observer Story
Ex-convict give pupils a tough talk on pitfalls of drug crime|: http://www.crawleyobserver.co.uk/news/local/ex-convict-give-pupils-a-tough-talk-on-pitfalls-of-drug-crime-1-4762048
Shaun Attwood
Shaun Attwood
Question Time
Hello Shaun,
I'm
from the school you spoke to on Friday morning. I'm sorry I didn't talk to you
afterwards I was trying to take everything in but can I just say that I
honestly thoroughly enjoyed your talk and it really has opened my mind up to a
lot of things. I even spent Saturday watching some of your YouTube videos and
explaining your story to my boyfriend which led to a rather heated discussion
about how prisoners should be treated!
I
would just like to ask a little question really, and that is just how do you
feel about people taking drugs now? Obviously you don't want them going through
those hard times but do you think drugs are acceptable if you take prison out
of the equation?
I
ask this because I have seen someone die due to drug intake in front of me, had
to deal with a sister who would sleep with older men to get drugs (and several
times ended up pregnant, youngest 13) and a brother who went to prison for drug
dealing and it absolutely killed me to think of what he could have gone through
in there. I don't think people that deal or do drugs are bad people at all, and
don't deserve to go through experiences like you did.
Lastly
I would just like to say how much I respect you for deciding to go into schools
to share your story and warn us of be dangers and reality that is out there.
I've always thought of the negative consequences of drugs and am rather
anti-drugs for my own personal use after my experiences but I had truthfully
never thought of the realities of what prison could do to you and what you have
to endure.
Thanks
again for your talk it has truly enlightened me,
Claire
My
response:
Thanks,
Claire. Your story is really moving, and I appreciate you sharing it. So sad to
read about the devastating consequences drugs have brought to your brother and
sister, and that someone died right in front of you.
You
asked how I feel about people taking drugs, and if drugs are acceptable if
prison is out of the equation. I’d rather young people didn’t do drugs, and
channelled their energy into positive things. In my opinion, the present
equation of how society treats drug users is all wrong. People tend to do drugs
because something is missing from their lives, or they have some kind of inner
turmoil. I feel that a lot of them are vulnerable young people, and should be
given counselling, therapy, drugs education and be guided into positive
activity. Instead, they are rounded up and thrown into prisons where hard drugs
are readily available. Where I was incarcerated, scared young people ended up
joining gangs and graduating from doing soft drugs before their arrests to
shooting up heroin and crystal meth. Surrounded by criminals, they learnt that
way of life. They had little chance of adapting to society when they were released
with drug addictions that had multiplied in strength. They nearly all came right
back to prison. It’s a disaster for society and the taxpayers, but big business
for prison industries and politicians. 1 in 100 adults are now in prison in
America, and private prisons are paying politicians to tighten laws even
further. I don’t want vulnerable young people going through hard times like
that here in the UK, but with the US private prisons setting up shop here, it’s
going to get more like America.
I
wish you happiness in life,
Shaun
Shaun
Attwood Chris Dorner
A Childhood Lost (by Charlotte)
When I first started writing to Troy Merck an innocent man on Death Row in July 2011 as is
usual we went through the stage of trying to find out as much as we could about
each other. He asked me about my family and I shared everything I could
possibly think of at the time including the fact that my youngest son has
dyslexia. This was his response:
I was born with something called Foetal Alcohol Effect.
It’s a milder version of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. ADHD is one of the things
that manifest with it. That and the condition with my eyes. It’s called ptosis.
I have an IQ that ranges between 145 – 125 which is rare
for someone with F.A.E. but because of the ADHD and the eyes, not to mention
being dirt poor, I hated school. I broke my teacher’s ribs in 3rd Grade and
would run off as soon as I got off the bus. I just could not sit still and
focus for the length of a class so I stayed in trouble with the teachers and
was fighting everyday with the kids who picked on my eyes and ragged clothes.
As a result I got very little education. About 3 months
into the 8th Grade. But only two grades did I actually go for more than half
the year. 5th and 7th. In the 4th I went for 33 days and in the 6th I went on
full day and two partial days. They passed me both times.
They didn’t know how to deal with Special Needs kids at
that time up in the mountain schools.
Then he added,
Alright I’m gonna get this in the mail to ya so it’ll be
on it’s way tonight. I’ll write about the family but that’s a full letter unto
itself.
Up until that letter written in October 2011 I’d had no
idea about anything that had happened in his childhood. Now I was curious, but
I didn’t have to wait long. Just a few short days later I received another
letter which completely blew my mind.
To say my family was dysfunctional is an understatement
and my childhood was far from idyllic.
My Mom was a few days past 14 years old when she got
married to Jesse Whitmire who was 25. He’s the father of all my sisters and
brother as far as anyone knows but there’s always a chance that he’s not.
Apparently, Mom’s tail got hot early on, long before she got married and the
ring on her finger didn’t stop her if she got the chance for some strange.
No one knows for sure who my Dad is. She was divorced and
remarried to Hubert Merck when she got pregnant with me but by all accounts he
had been in Vietnam for about a year when it was discovered she was pregnant
with me.
She always told me Jesse was my Dad because he kept
coming round to see the other kids and get a little while Hubert was at war.
Who knows?
She had had Rosie, Roberta, Stacy and Tony and decided
she didn’t want any more so when she got knocked up again she caused herself to
miscarry. She did that twice and had one still born before she had me. She
didn’t want me either and tried all the same methods she had used before to
cause a miscarriage but as she used to tell me as she was pounding my head in,
I just wouldn’t die.
I mean that Charlotte. She would be beating me to a
bloody pulp and screaming about trying to kill me in the womb and say stuff
like “You little bastard, I don’t know why you just wouldn’t die. You’ve always
resisted me for some reason”. Even at 4 or 5 years old I was so stubborn. I’d
be a bloody mess and yet still say something like “You should have kept your
drawers on.” And she’d really go nuts then.
I have no doubt she would’ve killed me as a kid if she
thought she could get away with it. At 10 years old I was placed in a Christian
Childrens’ Home. She was given the choice, do it yourself or we do it.
Despite all that I love my Mom and had lots of fun. Hell,
for the most part I’ve done whatever I wanted since I was a baby. I’d get my
ass beat for drinking, playing around with some girl, or taking off from home
as a kid, but so what? I’d get the hell beat out of me anyway, so why not do
what was fun? Also I hated being dirt poor, so I learnt how to get out and get
money by hook or by crook, which means I’d work or steal, it didn’t matter to
me.
So that was me. The wild mountain boy with the fucked up
family.
As you can imagine I really didn’t comprehend what he had
just told me. Having 2 young boys myself, it seemed inconceivable that anyone could
do this to their own child and I know that the majority of parents would feel
the same. I know we all lose patience with our kids from time to time, and
although I really try not to judge people, I was finding this really hard to
deal with.
After a while we started talking about me visiting and
for some time that is what consumed our letters. Then we had to start thinking
about his case again in early March this year when oral arguments were
scheduled for his post-conviction appeals and state habeas corpus. That was
when we started talking about me writing about his childhood so people could
understand him more clearly.
This is the last that he wrote to me about his mother.
Since then he’s told me it’s just buried too deep and he doesn’t want to go down
that road anymore, which I can understand completely. I was worried about how I
was going to portray his Mom in anything that I wrote as I was finding it
extremely hard to be objective.
I love my Mom and forgive her, but don’t worry about how
she comes off. Just tell the truth. Having people understand what really
happened is what’s important.
And the fact is Mom was more than a bit nuts, especially
when it came to me. She blamed me for “ruining her life” as she would put it.
She would say that she would’ve killed me when I was born by putting me in a
‘tote sack’, tying a rock around it and throwing it in a river or lake. People
in their right minds don’t say things like that to kids that are 2,3, or 4
years old. She would get me down on the living room floor and stomp me as hard
as she could until she was too tired to stomp anymore, sometimes just because
she was mad that I didn’t die before I was born when she was trying to kill me.
Baby, at those times she was fucking crazy. Honestly I
suspect she had some sort of bi-polar disorder, but no one in the country knew
anything about that crap back then.
Plus Mom was hooked in prescription drugs and that too
was something people didn’t think too much about back then. They knew how to
tell a drunk or a dope addict but if the legal medication was being prescribed
by a doctor then there really couldn’t be much wrong with it, or so they
thought. I feel sorry for my Mom more than anything. She needed help and never
got it.
At that point I decided to look into court documents to
see if I could find out more. The abuse he had suffered at the hands of his
mother was well-documented from her trying to self-abort by rubbing turpentine
on her stomach and drinking excessively as well as a whole host of other
things, to the sustained attacks that he had to endure as a young boy. So by
the time I went to visit him in May I was expecting the stories he told me
which usually ended with ‘I got my ass whooped for that one.’
But one story stood out amongst the rest, one story that
made me go back to my hotel room and weep. He had told me of a time in his life
when his sister’s boyfriend used to take him fighting. This was a place where
children used to fight against one another and the adults used to wager on the
outcome. Troy always used to do well, because even though he was small for his
age, he was a lot stronger than he looked so he always surprised his opponent.
However, one night was different. One night he was handed a knife and when he
turned to see who his opponent was, all he saw was a dog sitting there. Troy
refused. There was no way in the world he could harm a dog. He was beaten
severely, but he still refused. Every threat was made, and still the physical
attack continued, but he would not do anything to harm that animal.
I had a lot of time in between visits to process
everything that he told me, we spoke about it a little in our letters and when
I returned in November for Thanksgiving weekend I was expecting a lot more of
the same type of stories. Nothing prepared me for one particular story which I
will share with you now. Troy had just had his hair cut quite a lot shorter
than it was the last time I was there. I was teasing him saying that it
wouldn’t be long before they wouldn’t have to cut it because he would be bald!
(He’s going a little thin on top) ‘You can see my scars better now,’ he said
‘See that one?’ pointing to a silver line that ran about 2 inches on the top of
his head, ‘Mom did that with a table leg.’ He went onto tell me about the last
ever time that his mother beat him. She had her boyfriend tie him to a chair,
and she took a leg that propped up the table that was in their trailer. She
proceeded to beat him. His screams were heard outside and the kids from the
park went and got his sister who lived nearby. When she got there Troy was a
bloody mess and his mother was still pounding him over the head with the table
leg. She managed to wrestle with her mother and stop her assault. Then she
turned to the small boy tied to the chair. He was sat with his head bowed,
breathing heavily and when his sister knelt down by the side of him and asked
if he was ok, a quiet voice replied ‘Just untie be before they kill me, I don’t
want to die tied up.’ She took him back home with her and cleaned him up and he
stayed there overnight. The next day he went back to his trailer, took the
shotgun out of his room and chased his mother around the trailer park. After
that day, she never touched him again. She knew that if she did he would crack.
He once said to me that she couldn’t control what she was
doing, but she knew well enough when it was time to stop, that she had pushed
him so far. He had grown up in a home filled with violence from before he was
born and he had to adapt to survive. But even through that he kept his humanity,
and his capacity to love. The man he is today is in spite of his childhood, not
because of it. He is intelligent, funny, very strong minded and opinionated,
and yet he is loving and gentle when he needs to be. That is the man that Troy
Merck is, not the monster that the state want you to think he is, and that is
the man that I fell in love with, a man that shouldn’t be where he is, a man
who should be free!
Click here to read Charlotte's blog about visiting Troy on Death Row.
Please support One for Ten, who are exposing the endemic corruption in the US justice system that has resulted in hundreds of innocent people ending up on Death Row:
http://www.indiegogo.com/supportoneforten
Please support One for Ten, who are exposing the endemic corruption in the US justice system that has resulted in hundreds of innocent people ending up on Death Row:
http://www.indiegogo.com/supportoneforten
Shaun Attwood
Question Time
Dear
Mr Attwood,
I'm
the student who walked out of your speech today and would just like to
apologise. I knew I was about to faint so I knew I had to stop myself from
either doing that or throwing up or worse.
Your
talk was incredible and opened up my eyes (especially as I have recently become
hooked on the TV show 'Prison Break'). What you had to say hit particularly
close to home as I had an uncle die from drug use so it is an emotive subject
for me as well.
I
just wanted to ask a few questions as I didn't get a chance to after your talk:
1.
Do you think the people who are in those types of prisons deserve that type of
treatment?
2.
Prison life must have been so different to your previous high-flying
millionaire lifestyle, how did you cope?
3.
Did you do anything bad in prison? In order to protect yourself from being
beaten up by other prisoners for example?
4.
Do you think it is the physically or mentally weak who are at most risk in
places like that? And how quickly do they adapt?
Thank
you very much for your time, I truly enjoyed your talk until my departure and I
can say that you achieved your aim of inspiring a young person not to do drugs
and mess with the law!
Thank
you once again,
Tom
My
response:
Tom,
Sorry
to read about your uncle. I can’t imagine what you and your family went
through. I’m glad you liked the talk. It's receiving messages like yours that
makes everything I went through seem worthwhile. I hope my story stays with you
and continues to influence you in positive ways. Now, onto your questions:
1
Prison shouldn’t be easy. It is a punishment. But it should be humane because when
a society treats its prisoners like animals some of them will behave like
animals when they return to society. The key to getting crime down is education
and rehabilitation, but US prisons offer none of that because they profit by
prisoners coming right back. They get around $50,000 per year per prisoner.
Scandinavia has the lowest reoffending rates in the world, and the most
education and rehabilitation in their prisons.
2
I coped through strong family support. By reading, writing, blogging and trying
to turn the situation into the educational opportunity of a lifetime. By
exercise, including yoga and meditation. By associating with prisoners who were
doing positive things or fun things like playing chess.
3
I stayed away as best I could from doing anything bad in prison. I had to stand
up for myself, but I never started any trouble.
4
Yes the physically and mentally weak are most at risk in prison. If they don’t
adapt fast, they suffer abuse from prisoners and guards. I saw it happening constantly
in there.
I
hope you do well in life, Tom.
Shaun
Shaun
Attwood
One for Ten
Please support this documentary series however you can - even if just by sharing to your friends, and help expose the injustice of the US Death Penalty.
On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/oneforten?group_id=0
Website http://www.indiegogo.com/supportoneforten
Shaun Attwood
On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/oneforten?group_id=0
Website http://www.indiegogo.com/supportoneforten
Shaun Attwood
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