Asked for the lowest point of his hellish sojourn in Arizona’s penal system, Shaun Attwood answers without hesitation. "When I was moved to maximum security," he says.

"It was a two-man cell full of cockroaches. Trying to sleep with cockroaches crawling all over me was impossible at first. I had to be put on medication. I ended up having a nervous breakdown. They tickled the palms of your hand and your feet. They go in your ears, try to eat your ear wax. And you’re locked in that cell all night. You see the cockroaches lining up in the cracks in the wall, as if they know what time lights go out. And as soon as the lights go out, they swarm the room."

Attwood, who earned his place in maximum security when his bail bond hit $1.5m, adds:"You can put the sheet around you to keep them off, but you’ve got these skin infections and it’s sweaty and moist so you end up taking the sheet off you and letting the cockroaches crawl on you."

Though he continued to see imaginary cockroaches even after gaining his liberty in December 2007, Attwood had much more to fear from the two-legged inmates of the Maricopa County jail system. His new book, Hard Time: A Brit in America’s Toughest Jail, is a tale of brutality and a lesson in behind-bars etiquette, with its rigid racial divides.

"When you go in, the ‘head of the race’ meets you straight away and tells you the rules," he explains. "He has guys under him called ‘torpedoes’ who will smash people, no questions asked, if you violate the rules. You can’t go talking to the guards because then they’ll think you’re snitching. You must take showers or they’ll smash you for having bad hygiene. You can’t sit and eat with the other races or do certain dealings with the other races. You have to sit with your own race.

"If someone calls you a punk or a bitch, or hits you, you have to fight the person on the spot or your whole race will smash you."

The tale of how Attwood, 41, came to spend a miserable five-and-a-half years incarcerated in Arizona begins with a happy childhood in the north west of England. He even carried on living at the family home in Widnes while he studied business at Liverpool University.

In 1989, Attwood came to Manchester’s Thunderdome club, and tried

ecstasy for the first time. He fell in love with the rave scene.

"I swore when I went to America that I would try to transfer the Manchester rave scene over to Phoenix, when I had enough money. And that’s what I tried to do," he says.

In 1991, Attwood emigrated to Arizona, where he had an aunt working in insurance. He forged a work visa and got a job as a stockbroker, cold-calling for up to 15 hours a day, even rummaging through the rubbish of business rivals to get potential leads.

Within five years, he was making $500,000 a year but had returned to ecstasy. He began buying the drugs in bulk and distributing them, doing business with fearsome gangsters. He also organised raves, the biggest of which saw 5,000 people gathering at a ranch near Phoenix.

When the police caught up with him, Attwood spent 775 days on remand before agreeing a plea bargain in which he was convicted of drug dealing and money laundering. That time on remand is the subject of Hard Time, with another book to come covering the rest of his sentence.

"I’d like to make it clear that America was good to me. I broke

numerous laws and take full responsibility for putting myself in jail," says Attwood, who now lives in Guildford and tours schools, telling teenagers his cautionary tale.

But he feels strongly that the world should be told about the conditions in the jail system overseen by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who once bragged that he spent more on feeding the guard dogs than the prisoners, on the basis that ‘the dogs never committed a crime and they’re working for a living’.

Attwood writes of prisoners suffering festering untreated skin conditions in sweltering heat, eating food in which dead rats are sometimes found and enduring a culture of violence.

Though Attwood escaped the worst of that violence, he ‘had to get used to the sound of someone’s head being smashed against a toilet and the sound of bodies being thrown around.’ He immersed himself in literature and books about psychology and philosophy, becoming a yoga-practising vegetarian. He also capitalised on his Englishness to avoid hostility.

"People would come and talk to me about Benny Hill or the Spice Girls, and ask me if I knew the Queen," he says.

Attwood secretly began writing of life in jail, his letters smuggled out of prison by his aunt and turned into Jon’s Jail Journal, a website now expanded to include other prisoners’ tales.

Among them is the tale of mafiosa Two Tonys, a mass murderer. "He told me they all had it coming because they were rival gangsters," says Attwood.

"There’s a strange pecking order: if you’ve murdered gangsters then you’re at the top of it; if you’ve murdered a woman or a kid, you’re at the bottom of it and you’re likely to be killed by the other killers."

His book comes just as debate rages in Britain as to whether our record high prison population is the best way to tackle crime.

"Prison works when it’s set up for rehabilitation and education," says Attwood. "If you treat people like animals, a proportion of them are going to return to society and behave like animals."

• Hard Time: A Brit In America’s Toughest Jail by Shaun Attwood is published on Thursday (Mainstream, £9.99). For his jail blog, see http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com/

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