200 years, one life: Shaun Atwood on prison, freedom and redemption. “I have to be a millionaire by the time I’m thirty”

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Written by Amber Williams

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For Shaun Atwood, money and success didn’t just become a goal, it became his definition of happiness and eventually, the definition of his identity. From becoming top stock trader in America in just his twenties, and that still not fulfilling him, to selling 4 million dollars worth of ecstasy and consequently facing a potential 200 year sentence behind the bars of the prison with the highest death rate in America – Shaun was forced to rethink true happiness.

Today, Shaun describes happiness as ordinary moments with his three-year-old son, loving wife and every day freedom feeling like a “piece of paradise.” After 8 years of what many would describe as worse than hell, Shaun realised he had no other choice but to neglect ‘society’s enforcement’ of ‘money is success’ – which led him to prison - and start living by a new motto. In our interview with him, Shaun generously spoke openly about his regretful decisions that led him towards imprisonment, the psychological pressures of prison and the lessons he believes young people can learn from his harsh experiences.

Long before prison, drugs and the American rave scene, Shaun was a normal boy growing up in Cheshire, fascinated by money and the possibilities of the stock market at the young age 14 and fascinatingly, already investing at 16. Yet, Shaun grew up with the battle of social anxiety and being very self-conscious as a teenager. More seriously, Shaun experienced an incident that left him with long lasting psychological trauma: he was confronted and assaulted by an older group of intoxicated men whilst stopping at a local petrol station to fill up his mum’s car – not long after gaining his driver's license. Although the physical injuries healed, Shaun said that the impact on his anxiety intensified and left long lasting mental scars – making him fear socialising with strangers. Money was also an important part of Shaun’s early life. He had spoken about growing up without financial security, describing a childhood where money wasn’t something that could be simply taken for granted. In our interview, when asked “Would you say these childhood issues drove you to the incessant need for success, money and popularity to prove something to your younger self?” In which He replied “you’ve just nailed my root causes. I had awful social anxiety, but when I started using ecstasy it all went away”

For Shaun, the drug initially appeared to offer something he had struggled to find naturally: confidence and freedom from the anxiety that confined him to loneliness. However, his reflection suggests that what felt like a perfect solution at the time was actually masking deeper problems. The beginning of his story therefore raises a more important question about how young people are dealing with problems they don’t yet have the tools understand properly. Rather than seeing his university years – the start of the ecstasy use – as simply a series of isolated decisions, Shaun now connects it to his experiences of social anxiety, his desire to prove himself and the environment he found himself surrounded by. He described this as “self-medicating your own trauma” – a perspective he said he only developed when the “drug cloud” cleared from his head. What began as an escape from social anxiety eventually developed into something far more dangerous.

After moving to America for the big stock market trade and working his way up to the top of the firm, earning millions of dollars Shaun decided it still wasn’t enough for him; and started to begin raving again in Arizona rave scenes and vowed to transform Arizona’s party style into Manchester’s chaotic rave scenes – through the use of ecstasy. Shaun described how His drug operation grew from supplying a small group of friends to operating on a much larger scale, with his business eventually becoming associated with the New Mexican Mafia. He also became involved in competition with the ecstasy operation of Salvador ‘sammy the bull’ Gravano, a former Gambo crime-family underboss. The scale of the growing operation meant that Atwood was no longer simply experimenting with drugs or participating in a few rave scenes – he had entered a dangerous world that would be impossible to get out of safely.

The ‘cloud’ was eventually shattered by the arrival of the SWAT team – a year after he decided to stop selling ecstasy. Shaun describes that moment of his arrest as the ‘wake up call’ he needed since the first time he decided to take ecstasy. Suddenly, the lifestyle that seemed once exciting was impossible to romanticise.

“When the SWAT team came, the cloud lifted out of my head and I thought, how on earth am I still alive? What the hell have I just done with my life?” Shaun states. He realises the people he surrounded himself with played a significant role in normalising his behaviour. He says “I was surrounded by people who were doing the same crazy things I was doing. We were all sliding down the same slippery slope together, reinforcing each others insane behaviour.” Yet, it was his arrest on May 16th, 2002 that brought that progression into focus. Suddenly, the pursuit of money, status and excitement was replaced by the rough conditions of America’s highest death rate prison.

After his arrest in May 2002, Shaun spent 26 months on remand before finally being sentenced to nine and a half years. After being asked ‘what would you say was the worst experience in prison?’ Despite all the horrendous physical experiences, Shaun stated that in reality, the worst experience was “psychologically, not knowing what my sentence was for 26 months”. However, Shaun was threatened with a 200 year sentence if he attempted to go to trial. Then came the reality of prison – in which he told us: “When people are getting slammed into walls, being beaten up and killed by other prisoners, and even guards, you go into raw survival mode.” And “every single thing you ever thought you knew about safety has completely going out of the window.” His graphic description of his time in prison is a stark contrast to the glamorous life he had been living before his arrest. The money, the parties and the freedom that had once seemed so important became suddenly irrelevant. Prison stripped away the layers of life he had built for himself, leaving only one thing at his core: survival.

The physical conditions of his experience in America’s highest death rate prison, were a constant battle against painful survival or slow death. He recalls large cockroaches infesting the prison, dead rats in the food - in which they called ‘red death’ - infections, bed sores from the Arizona heat, and most importantly the constant adrenaline from being in “raw animal survival mode”. The prison became a world where comfort was an impossible luxury and survival was the currency. During his time in prison, he states he lost 28 pounds of weight due to the extreme mental stress and horrid food conditions. Often the bread was rotting with mould, furriness and hard as brick, ‘We would have to swirl the stale bread in water to be able to make it go down”. Shaun was no longer being treated like a rave God, but forced to live at the very bottom of the food chain. Something as basic as eating had become a daily reminder of how little control he had over his own life.

Prison didn’t just build walls around Shaun, it built walls between him and the people he loved. He describes losing his girlfriend of the time whilst he was in prison in which he recalls the memory of being ‘over the phone and crying, but you can't let prisoners seeing you cry as it makes you a target.” His relationships with family, friends and loved ones existed now through a telephone line, stretched across the distance between the life he had lost and the life he was trapped inside. He goes on to tell us that in prison, you have no choice but to reduce yourself to the emotional complexity of a robot – or else your already dead. He undoubtedly regrets the choices that led him to prison, for the sake of his mother: who he said had severe nervous breakdowns from knowing his prison conditions. As the months passed, the psychological pressures began to eat at Shaun’s mental health. The physical walls of the prison were only one form of confinement; increasingly, he found himself fighting a battle inside his own mind. At one point, Sean said he began seeing imaginary cockroaches and hearing voices that weren’t there, due to the extreme physical and mental stress from the conditions in the prison. He was eventually prescribed medication, which he says eventually allowed him to somewhat sleep. Yet, the medication still came with difficulties. “The medication clouded my mind – I couldn’t read or write anymore” he recalled.

For someone who had built the foundations of their life upon ambition, intelligence, and making money, losing the ability to read and write represented another loss or control he wasn’t even allowed to grieve. Prison had already stripped Shaun of his freedom but now Shaun felt as if it was beginning to take away his will to live and his identity. The prison to him was beginning to resemble a factory of numbness: different people entered with different stories, but the relentless machinery of fear, isolation and uncertainty threatened to produce the same hollow version of a human being. Eventually, Shaun knew he had to find another way to cope. Meditation became a crucial part of attempting to reclaim his mental health – alongside yoga and martial arts. At first, Shaun said he was finding it impossible to quieten his mind, in which he told us “my mind had gone so fast”. After years of living in a constant state of adrenaline: silence itself had become a stranger. Yet, Shaun pursued meditation even while surrounded by hundreds of cockroaches and rowdy prisoners. Slowly, he began to gain a sense of control and told us “after a while, there was nothing in my mind”. In an environment where almost everything controlled him, his mind became one of the old familiar places he could begin to reclaim.

Furthermore, prison also started to not only change his perspective upon himself, but also others. Prison challenged many of assumptions any regular person would’ve carried with them for life. He recalls growing up, and thinking people addicted to heroine were simply dangerous or immoral. Yet, he states living alongside them forced him to reconsider that view. “When I was growing up, a heroine addict was portrayed to me as someone who would rob my grandmother and was someone evil.”

Yet, prison exposed him to the stories behind the addiction: stories of abuse, neglect, and trauma.

“You hear their stories, of them growing up as victims of abuse and neglect, horror story after horror story after horror story.” He began seeing people through eyes of compassion rather than through eyes of judgment. Additionally, this experience also shaped Shaun’s criticism of the justice system in which he argues that imprisonment worsens people's mental health and addictions severely, that made them get into jail in the first place. He said “they are taking people with awful mental health and forcing them into places where the conditions are so stressful, their mental health and addiction problems are compounded.

Eventually, after the battle of uncertainty, the thick prison walls that had defined Shaun’s life began to come down. He was going to be free. After spending so many long years awaiting his release, he discovered that freedom did not feel at all the way he had expected it to. He told us, “being able to simply buy a T-shirt or a simple banana, the freedom I felt that day – that was the height of ecstasy for me.” The man who once believed “I have to be a millionaire by the time I’m thirty” no longer measured happiness in money. After years if having his freedom taken from him, Shaun Atwood discovered that the greatest luxury in life was simply having the freedom of a life to live. He once chased millions, now he counts his blessings in moments. In Shaun’s own words “every day is a piece of paradise”.