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High-profile sheriff makes inmates look like pinkos - Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona
Insight on the News, June 24, 1996 by John Elvin
One Arizona lawman has made a name for himself by going out of his way not to coddle prisoners. Among his stunts: tent camps, chain gangs and pink underwear. Will female chain gangs be next?
So what's so great about Phoenix? Maybe it's the "ya'll-come" attitude.
Come to Phoenix and reinvent yourself, renew yourself, rebuild the dream that burned out in Southern California, Texas or one of those graying Northeastern states. There's lots of room for anyone who wants to try it.
But get one thing straight, stranger: Be on your best behavior. This ain't some milquetoast, pantywaist burg where good citizens cower behind their doors when the bad guys come to town at high noon.
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Phoenix and surrounding Maricopa County are the land of legends. For all the new development and rampant growth, it's still a place temperamentally fit for "The Duke" -- meaning, for any pilgrims in the audience, John Wayne, and for Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix, Roy Rogers and all the saddles-and-sixguns archetypes that got railroaded away from the heart of our American identity by the pointy-heads and bleeding hearts.
Of course, there are a passel of black hats to go with the white hats. There are larcenists, loonies and losers ranging from Charles Keating -- that pinstriped Jesse James of savings-and-loan infamy -- to wacko train-derailers and motley gangsters from Los Angeles who set up ambushes for local cops and contribute to the second-highest burglary rate in the country.
So, naturally, Maricopa County is the stomping ground of "America's toughest sheriff," Joe Arpaio. How tough is he? Why, he's the lawman who put prisoners in tents, made 'em eat green-bologna sandwiches and wear pink underwear. He's so mean, he took away their cigarettes, coffee, raunchy magazines. movies and trash TV. Guests of the county, housed in-huge, scrounged, Korean War-era Army tents where temperatures sometimes reach 130 degrees, can spend their "free" moments watching the Weather Channel, ESPN, the Disney Channel or videos featuring House Speaker Newt Gingrich lecturing on Western civilization.
"Sheriff Joe" delights in describing the location of his camps, aesthetically placed between the city dump and the county pound's animal crematorium. He has the P.T. Barnum knack for stunts guaranteed to draw media attention. Soon as you're sure you've heard it all, Arpaio comes along with another dose of tough-guy penology. Of course, it's fair to say that at a time when governments are slashing operating budgets, running the fourth-largest jail system in the country and trying otherwise to maintain law and order in a territory as large as New Jersey is a big job. You have to wonder who would even try it but a cussedly independent, slightly eccentric lawman with an ego the size of Camelback Mountain.
One of Arpaio's stunts involves having prisoners handle burial of indigents, a service that used to be contracted out at $60,000 a year. The program is called "Scared Stiff," because there's a moral benefit: "I want the prisoners to know who is being buried. Crack addicts, criminals, people whose lives have come to nothing." A group of ministers criticized the program, didn't like having the chain gangs in bright colors burying people. Arpaio shrugs it off.
The green-bologna gambit results from his successful campaign to feed prisoners for 90 cents each per day. The meat is commercially unsuitable due to oxidation, but he insists it's perfectly okay and will munch a sandwich in front of the TV cameras to prove it. The pink shorts resulted from prisoners stealing the regular-issue shorts with MCSO logo ("Maricopa County Sheriff's Office") and selling them on the streets as souvenirs. Now, a simple waistband check catches the thief, and the sheriff's got the franchise for a booming souvenir market. Sales of the pink underwear benefit his volunteer posse program.
Arpaio also grabbed the international spotlight when he instituted chain gangs. And if that's not tough enough, he's planning chain gangs for women. "we've never had women on chain gangs in America," he muses.
As with the men who serve on the gangs, the women would be volunteers. The process starts when an inmate breaks the rules in the tent city -- gets caught smoking, doing drugs or drinking coffee, for instance. For that, they get tossed back in the cell block. "They hate the cell block," Sheriff Joe says. "So I give them a chance to go back to the tents."
That chance means the chain gang. Prisoners are chained five to a group on 15-foot leg irons. They march in cadence called by the detention officer in charge, because five guys on a short chain can get pretty fouled up if they don't march in unison. They work six days a week sweeping streets, clearing brush, removing graffiti -- even detouring off public lands to tidy up a church lawn. A cussword can bring orders from the officer in charge to hit the dirt and do 50 push-ups.
If the volunteer works hard and behaves well, he graduates back into the tents. For real -- he actually gets a diploma from Sheriff Joe. It may sound goofy, but the sheriff swears it gives some of the "graduates" a feeling of pride, accomplishment and self-worth. Proof of a sort is that fellow inmates initially razzed the chain gangs as they left or returned to jail, but now they're actually sort of respectful. Maybe it's because the guys on the gangs are celebrities. TV crews come from all over the world to film them at work.
