Hard Time: A Brit in America's Toughest Jail by Shaun Attwood

Author:Shaun Attwood [Shaun Attwood]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mainstream Digital
Published: 2010-12-13T16:00:00+00:00

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By the end of 2002, Marco and his Praetorian guards seemed to have more control over Tower 6 than the jail administration. Every day, the guards chose Little Italy to serve chow and turned a blind eye when they stole the leftover Ladmo bags and trays and divvied the food out to the heads of all of the races. They were applying Troll’s law – he who controls the food controls the prisoners – on a mass scale. Business was booming for the ‘two-for-one store’ Marco ran out of D15, which enabled inmates to buy commissary provided they repaid double on ‘store day’ – the day of the week our commissary orders were delivered. Whenever the goon squad was due to raid our pod, Marco knew in advance. During such searches, the guards confiscated our extra clothing, towels and sheets, but Marco simply had the next shift walk Little Italy to the property room. They would return with mountains of fresh laundry, grinning triumphantly.

Marco dealt with disgruntled inmates sympathetically. He presided over the kangaroo court of white-inmate conflicts, and when he banished inmates from our pod or decreed they must settle things by fighting, everyone later commented on how fairly he’d adjudicated. His power was such he could have the guards move any inmate in or out of our pod, and he was inundated with requests from inmates wanting to move. They mostly wanted to move into our pod, which was humming with the vibrancy of Little Italy.

Settling into a disciplined study and exercise regimen was helping the time go by for me. Lying on my bunk at angles that minimised the discomfort of my bedsores, I read for hours. At first, the abundance of time to read rekindled my teenage obsession with stock-market books. But then a prisoner urged me to read two novels: George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Prior to my arrest, I had considered reading fiction a frivolous pastime. The last novel I’d read was To Kill a Mockingbird, required reading in high school. But in the dystopian jail environment, I related to Orwell’s Big Brother and Room 101. Reading Huxley, I saw parallels in my life with the characters taking grams of the hallucinogenic drug soma and orgying. These books dramatised two things I hadn’t stopped dwelling on since my arrest: the excesses of my lifestyle and the justice system.

I’d been doing yoga exercises almost daily since I read Yoga Made Easy sent by my sister, Karen. At first I saw the book as an attempt at effemination and hid it under my mattress to avoid being mocked. But Karen insisted I give the basic postures a try, and I felt so relaxed after stretching my cables I kept coming back for more. I was soon proficient in postures such as the cobra, forward bend, cat, dog, side bend and seated spinal twist, and I yearned to master the harder ones.

As well as working out with Marco, I established a

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