No one knows more about second chances than Tony Attwood – or the judge that gave the chance to change.
In the dusty gloom of a café on a weekday morning, the 42-year-old is a solid presence. Slicked-back short-back-and-sides, expensive wool overcoat, quietly spoken, with the methodical, careful movements of a heavyweight boxer. Sitting in this Cowley Road café could be a businessman.
Nothing in his appearance or manner betrays the fact that, for a while, Tony Attwood’s business was other people’s property.
Staring down the police station photographer’s lens in the mid-2000s is a gaunt, pale-faced thief with a prison buzz-cut. He’s been arrested for burglary; or, better put, for another burglary.
For years, he was one of Oxford’s most entrenched offenders who spent vast chunks of his early adulthood inside; committing crimes in order to fund the heroin and crack cocaine habit he picked up in prison.
Now, he runs a charity – Hope and Vision Communities – supporting ex-offenders beat the drug addictions that have blighted their lives and, in turn, blighted society.
So how did Tony go from criminal to charity chief? It was, he says in the gloom of the café, thanks to a judge.
Becoming a man
He grew up in Cowley in the 80s and 90s. His father worked hard, drank harder and was an even tougher disciplinarian, feeding the boy’s growing distrust in authority figures.
There was no love lost between them. But when his dad died from cancer when Tony was still in his teens he learned from his GP that the man he believed was his father was not, in fact, his birth dad.
“Every figure of authority in my life had let me down; not that they didn’t care for me or leave me because they didn’t love me,” he says.
“I didn’t want to hurt my mum so I didn’t confront her or ask if that was true.
“But I felt different.
“My mum was grieving at the time and I didn’t want to bring that up and add to her suffering or her loss.
“I kept it secret. My way of coping with that was drinking and smoking every day.
“I had he added responsibility of being a man and a provider; to me, that’s financial.
“I began selling cannabis and got trapped in the lifestyle from there.”
Having felt ‘unwanted’, he was now working a job where his phone was ‘always ringing’,” he says.
“[It was] giving me that sense of belonging and worth. That’s what I did; and I didn’t get caught until I was 21.”
If things had not already gone wrong, that arrest at 21 was when things began to spiral. And it was Tony’s honesty that proved his undoing.
He says: “My mum had always brought me up to believe honesty was the best policy. They asked if I wanted a solicitor and I said no.”
Tony was only caught with a ‘nominal’ amount of cannabis. Had he refused to answer the officers’ questions he may have got off with a fine.
Instead, he admitted his wider dealing. “Because I was honest, I was charged with possession with intent to supply.”
He was given a community order, which was later revoked and he was sent to prison.
And it was in prison he picked up the taste for crack cocaine and heroin. Unlike cannabis, the harder drugs pass out of the body quicker meaning they are harder to detect on tests.
On the outside, he says, he ‘started robbing, stealing and doing everything I said I’d never do’.
That, in turn, fed his ‘self-loathing’. “I didn’t like myself for what I was doing. Then I continued on using and drinking to get rid of those feelings.”
Rehab
When they sentence someone, judges have a number of options.
They can jail an offender – and Tony knows a lot about prison. They can ‘suspend’ that jail sentence, meaning a person has it hanging over their head and could be sent inside if they get into more trouble.
Or someone can be given a ‘community order’ of up to three years. To that order can be attached various conditions, like unpaid work in the community, a requirement to attend probation service sessions, or drug rehabilitation services.
Tony completed his first drug rehabilitation order in the mid-2000s. But every drug test he underwent he failed, he says.
Peter Ross was a lawyer for 24 years before he became a circuit judge in 2004. He retired in 2020 after sitting on three of Oxford’s grooming gang trials and became a trustee for Tony’s charity Hope and Vision Communities.
“The first thing you ask as a judge is whether this is a case where the custody threshold is passed to such a degree that anything other than a custodial sentence is inappropriate,” he tells the Oxford Mail on a video call.
“The second question you’re going to consider is if a community order with a residential rehabilitation place is appropriate.
“You have to ask the question on the material before me, is the person actually ready for residential rehab or is the residential rehab going to just be another revolving door?”
His first experience of Tony’s offending was a few burglaries at the Co-op and a ‘truly dreadful piece of dangerous driving’ as he tried to get away from the police officers chasing after him.
“I think I was begging for rehab, but it wasn’t available to me,” Tony remembers.
The judge says: “In Tony’s case, I concluded it was so serious that the custody threshold was passed and whilst I wouldn’t have turned my face against a community order, I concluded on the material before me he wasn’t in a position to make a success of rehabilitation at that point.”
While inside, Tony managed to find himself a place at a rehab in Devon. He went there on his release from prison.
“Again, I was still scared,” he says. Ignoring prohibitions on drugs, he managed to smuggle some in when he went to the rehab facility.
“The place was amazing. The people were amazing. It was on the edge of Exmoor and after not seeing a blade of grass for a while, it was an amazing place.”
Four weeks in, he had to write a letter to his dad. “It brought up a lot of emotions I couldn’t handle it. The drugs were there and I was kicked out the next day.”
He went back to Oxford and, within three days, was recalled to prison.
Booked in to Bullingdon Prison, the gaolers told him he wasn’t going to be going to the wing; instead, he was going ‘on block’ – or segregation.
“10 days with four walls and my own head and I started going crazy,” he says.
It was a book that saved him. He was handed Christian bestseller The Shack by a guard and its story of redemption and forgiveness struck a chord. He found faith in its pages – and the strength to make a second start.
“That was the start,” he says. He wrote to the treatment centre he’d been kicked out of and, a week before he was due to be released, the drugs team in the prison told him that he had been invited back to the Devon rehab.
Despite going back with the best of intentions, he was told when he was there that his mother had been diagnosed with cancer.
“When I hear the word ‘cancer’, I hear you’ve got three months to live and you’ll be dead in two. That fear pushed me out the door. I left,” he says.
He returned to Oxford and stayed clean for more than six months.
But old associations die hard and he was the victim of an alleyway stabbing – left with injuries to his legs, chest and back.
Despite telling doctors he was an addict, they gave him morphine.
“I was sat on the sofa without the use of my legs, in my own head again. And that was it, I was back using and back in prison again on remand.”
A co-defendant pleaded not guilty, leaving Tony with months on remand before he could be sentenced.
And he had a judge’s warning – given at his plea hearing – that he faced up to five years’ imprisonment ringing in his ears.
“Having heard that I was kind of in a hopeless state. I was preparing myself for that sentence, getting my head used to accepting I’m going to have a five year sentence then anything less than that is a bonus.”
That changed after he wrote to Berkshire drugs rehabilitation centre Yeldall Manor, telling them his story.
Staff from the facility came to see him in prison and offered him a place at their facility.
Judge Ross rewarded Tony’s persistence with a three-year community order with strict conditions.
Now, there is a publicly-funded programme run as a collaboration between Oxford Crown Court, addiction charity Turning Point, the police and Bullingdon Prison – where entrenched offenders whose crimes are motivated by their addictions are offered rehab places under lengthy community orders as a direct alternative to prison sentences. The Oxfordshire programme is gruelling, requiring the candidate to spend months on remand to ensure they are clean before being assessed as suitable by an experienced drugs support worker.
At the time, however, a three-year community order was ‘unheard of’, Tony says. “For my change to be the inspiration for this project was an honour,” he adds.
The recovering addict stayed in contact with the judge as part of regular reviews of his order.
Redemption
It was 2019 and he invited the judge who sentenced him to lunch at Yeldall.
“I sat at a table not only with Tony but a number of other residents. Some of them I had sent there,” the retired judge says.
“When you sit down to eat with people it’s an act which breaks down all types of barriers.
“We talked about families; theirs and mine. I think it’s very important that people realise judges are human beings. We have a life.”
After lunch, they walked around the grounds. Judge Ross says: “I turned to Tony and I said does this not strike you as utterly bizarre? Here we are, chatting away. Me, the judge who imprisoned you and you, the person I sent to prison. Yet here we are talking as if we had known each other for many, many years.”
It was during the visit that Tony outlined his vision to Judge Ross for an organisation that could support recovering addicts as they moved on from rehab.
“I could see people relapse, going back to prison. I could see people struggling to find somewhere to live,” Tony says.
“I had anxieties and fears about leaving. I didn’t want to go back to the life I was living. I didn’t want to go back to Oxford.”
Hope and Vision Communities was born from that post-lunch heart-to-heart.
Based in the Thames Valley, the charity supports former offenders as they go from rehab to a life outside.
“As a charity, we’re in the business of change,” Tony says.
The organisation rents seven supported accommodation properties and is looking add another property this year.
Peter Ross, now retired from the judge’s bench, is the charity’s chairman. “The first important thing is we give people somewhere to call home,” he says.
“It’s not just accommodation, it’s not just a shelter from the elements, it’s somewhere they can call home and having somewhere to call home is hugely important in terms of people’s security and self-worth.”
Now in its third year, Hope and Vision Communities currently has more than a dozen residents. All are working and, since joining the programme, two have gone on to properties of their own. It has been supported by Reeds, the Oxford-headquartered law firm that represented Tony through his years in-and-out of the criminal justice system.
And the charity’s greatest success story? Tony himself.
“If I can do it anyone can do it. I was that hopeless case,” he says.
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