Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, calls himself "America's toughest sheriff". His fame – or his infamy – comes from his tough stance on crime and criminals, to whom he gives no quarter. He does not flinch from putting women prisoners in chain gangs, for example, and humiliates male prisoners by forcing them to wear pink underpants under their black-and-white-striped jail garb.

In "Tent City", a notorious convict camp in the Arizona desert that lacks even basic air conditioning, temperatures regularly top 130 degrees, causing no end of heat-related health problems among its internees. Arpaio once boasted that he spends more feeding his police dogs than he does on feeding his prisoners: "The dogs never committed a crime and they work for a living," he said to justify the poor quality of the food served in his jails – just a couple of reasons, perhaps, why his jail system is subject to the most lawsuits and has the highest prisoner death rates in the US. One man who has experienced Sheriff Joe's brand of justice at first hand is Shaun Attwood.

Attwood, 41, originally from Widnes in Cheshire, has just published his first book, Hard Time: A Brit in America's Toughest Jail. It chronicles his journey from graduate party animal running wild on the rave scene in the north-west of England in the 1990s, to highly paid stockbroker in Phoenix, Arizona, then big-time drug dealer – before he was arrested and fell into the clutches of Maricopa's most famous son.

His book opens with a Swat team smashing their way into his home and pinning him to the floor before dragging him away to face drug and money laundering charges. The scale of his crimes was such that he could have been looking at a life sentence. Instead, after plea bargaining, he received nine and a half years, of which he served almost six. "America was good to me, but I accept that I put myself in jail by knowingly breaking the law for a number of years," he says.

"They put me in a place called Towers jail first and it was just raw survival. Everything I ever thought about prior to prison just went out of the window. All I could think about was surviving this experience. Among prisoners I used my Englishness as a talking point. Being English totally helped me; with prisoners, with guards. They called me 'England' and would ask me, had I met the Queen? Benny Hill? At that point I was just thankful for everything English that has gone worldwide. Although some people would come up and ask me, 'What language do they speak in England?' It was crazy."

There is a relatively new gang culture emerging in UK prisons. In the US prison system, gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood have been operating for decades. How did he cope with that? "One of the gang members told me I had to go with the white boys' gang. I said, 'Hang about, I'm the head of my own gang, I'm the head of the English.'" He says he managed to make the right connections with some of the more powerful prisoners – "People like 'Two Tonys', a convicted murderer who left dead bodies from Tuscon to Alaska" – which enabled him to opt out of gang affiliation.

A relatively new phenomenon in the UK prison system is the growing racial division. In the US this has always been the case. "There it's all racial," says Attwood. "As soon as you go in you become part of your own racial group gang. The head of the most powerful gang tells you if you're caught sitting with any of the other races you'll get smashed."

Conditions were cramped and hot and the drug culture was dominant. "I'd say 90% of the prisoners were shooting up crystal meth or heroin," says Attwood. There were toilets in the cells, but they often overflowed with sewage. And the food was poor. "In Arpaio's jail we were fed a diet of baloney, which was often green with mould," he adds.

"Sheriff Joe has paid out tens of millions of dollars in damages to the people who have died in his jails, at the hands of the guards, at the hands of other prisoners, or died of medical negligence, such as diabetics who needed their medicine. Sometimes sex offenders were streamed discreetly into the main population, but the guards would tell the prisoners who they were and then it was KOS (Kill on Sight) or SOS (Smash on Sight)."

The echoes with the British prison experience are loud, but the culture in the US is undoubtedly more intense and dangerous.

I tell Attwood that I began writing my prison column for the Guardian in an attempt to address the lack of information about the reality of prison life on the outside. Few of us on the landings, as I recall, seriously minded the conditions, but felt it unfair to read tabloid stories of "holiday camp" jails when for years all we had were buckets for toilets and self-inflicted death was on the increase.

Attwood's writing career too began in prison. "I became a writer by default. A guard told me, when I asked him how Sheriff Joe got away with the illegal conditions, that the world had no idea what went on in there. So my writing was started to expose those conditions in the hope they would be changed. The book also, I'm hoping, will create outrage among the American public to get the conditions changed."

Joe Arpaio, 'America's toughest sheriff', inspects inmates at Tent City. Photograph: Ross D Franklin/AP

Using a golf pencil sharpened on his cell walls and any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on, Attwood began chronicling the abuse that he and his fellow prisoners were subjected to. He smuggled his articles out to his parents, who posted them on the internet under the mantle of Jon's Jail Journal. It was the first ever blog by a serving prisoner and soon attracted a large international following. Cockroaches featured heavily.

"In the maximum-security section, where I spent 12 months, I couldn't believe all the cockroaches. I couldn't sleep with them crawling on me. They tickle your hands and limbs and go in your ears to eat your earwax. You can cover yourself with a sheet, but it's so hot you sweat all day and get skin infections and bedsores, especially on your buttocks. So I kept the sheet off, but having the cockroaches crawling on me gave me a nervous breakdown. I ended up on medication."

I feel slightly embarrassed when I share my own solitary prison cockroach experience. It happened in Wandsworth. I woke up one morning feeling an itch on my face. When I went to scratch it I jumped six feet out of bed on discovering that it was one of the big crawling insects. It gave me a nasty turn, but it hardly equates to anything Attwood went through.

One of my favourites of his blog entries was an early tale about a cockroach and his asthmatic neighbour. "A cockroach had crept into his inhaler during the night. When he woke up, he grabbed his inhaler and blasted the insect down his throat. Feeling the cockroach moving around inside of him, he promptly vomited his stomach contents. Unfortunately, the cockroach was not ejected, as it was lodged inside him. He was subsequently awarded "sufferer of the week", a title I came up with to entertain my neighbours."

Released in 2007, Attwood was deported back to the UK, where he tried to develop his writing career. His efforts were going nowhere until he won first prize in a short story competition with an entry about prison life entitled Shit Slinger. As a result of his win, he was assigned an author who travelled from Scotland to mentor him at the British Library. "Six months later I had literary agents competing to take me on, thanks to Sally Hinchcliffe working her magic," he says.

That magic has been so effective that Attwood has almost finished writing the prequel to Hard Time, and a writing career beckons. As we chat, it occurs to me that though both of us decry much of what we encountered during our respective prison times, we both appear to have gained a great deal from it. I often have to acknowledge the opportunities that prison gave me, particularly through education. Without prison, I would never have become a writer. But I have to emphasise that anyone who manages to build a successful life after a spell in a British jail does so in spite of most of what happens in there. The irony is that I would not have the life I have now if it were not for prison, yet because, like Attwood, my priority was to survive, I struggle to give the prison system credit for my so-called success.

Attwood agrees that going to jail has changed his life for the better, but only because of his own determination. I guess Sheriff Joe Arpaio would say, "There you go – my prisons work," Attwood says, smiling. "It's about survive and thrive."

• Shaun Attwood's blog is at jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com. Hard Time: A Brit in America's Toughest Jail is published by Mainstream at £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330-333 6846.