Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a polarizing figure in the great state of Arizona: some love him for his “tough” management of the Maricopa County jail while others believe that his management violates all manner of human rights laws. I tend to place myself in the latter category, but it is difficult to do so. It is pretty easy to see the point to the opposition. Frequently it is argued that prison inmates live a “luxurious” life—complete with three squares a day, shelter, access to books & the internet, and cable television. People often take this argument to an extreme, citing the fact that these conditions are better than what they have living as an “honest” citizen.
Of course, we have to be watchful to ensure that this argument is not taken too far. I cannot afford cable television and on some days I don’t get three meals, but this does not mean that my life would be better off in a prison. Sure, I may receive three meals a day and cable television. But I would also have to join a gang and fight for my life (and dignity) on a daily basis. Oh joy.
But what does this have to do with Sheriff Arpaio? Well, for those of you who don’t know who he is, let me fill you in. Aripaio bills himself as “America’s toughest sheriff” and seems to fancy himself in the old West, fighting stagecoach robbers and the like. [An ironic fact, given that he is from Springfield, Massachusetts. But our nation is full of city slickers who fancy themselves to be real cowboys.] In 1992, Joe Arpaio became sheriff of Maricopa County (think Phoenix). That’s when the fun began.
Sheriff Arpaio had some changes in store for the way prison operations were handled. Thinking it ridiculous that prison inmates should be fed for more money than it took to feed his dogs, Arpaio began buying up outdated, surplus food and serving it up to inmates. He particularly likes to serve outdated and oxidized green bologna. Arpaio also cut inmates down to two meals a day, to save on costs. One of Arpaio’s most infamous moves was to establish “Tent City.” This is something that has to be seen to be believed. While many prisons set up tents to house inmates to relieve overcrowding and congestion, Tent City is located near Phoenix, Arizona. It gets hot in Phoenix. Very hot. During the summertime, temperatures inside the inmate tents routinely reach 150 degrees. Arpaio has a talent for stirring up conservative sentiment in response to public outcry:
It’s 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents and they didn’t commit any crimes, so shut your mouths.
And the people cheered. The comment just made me smile because it reminded me that our soldiers in Iraq are, in many ways, like prisoners. You’re right, Joe: they didn’t commit any crimes. So why are they being forced to fight a misguided war in hellish conditions?
Arpaio also re-instituted the chain gang so that inmates could once again perform free work for the county. Not wanting to be “discriminatory,” he expanded the concept to include women and juveniles. Yes…you heard me. A juvenile chain gang. Doesn’t the thought of forty juveniles swinging sledgehammers on a railroad conjure up the image of a Dickens’ novel? It was a world’s first. Yay.
Sheriff Arpaio believes strongly in taking away privileges from prisoners since they have forfeited their right to have these things. He took away pornography. He took away cigarettes. He took away their weight training equipment so that they couldn’t exercise. He took away their movies. He took away their coffee because it has “no nutritional value.” He took away cable television until it was determined that there was a federal court order requiring that prisons have cable tv. So he hooked it back up, but modified it to only display the Disney channel and the Weather channel. Why the weather channel? Take it away Joe:
So the inmates know how hot it’s going to be when they’re working on my chain gangs.
Beautiful. Sheriff Arpaio also bought up a bunch of Newt Gingrich lectures and pipes them into the prisons so that everyone can enjoy the wisdom of Newt. When asked if he also piped in any Democratic lectures, Arpaio said that a Democratic lecture series would only help explain why there were so many inmates in prison to begin with.
Sheriff Arpaio has many ardent supporters. As I mentioned at the start of this post, they believe that he is doing the right thing by not “coddling” inmates. Why should inmates get to live a “life of luxury” while the rest of us sweat it on the outside? Why should taxpayers support such policies? I agree, in part. Our prison system is broken. Prison costs have skyrocketed and that burden falls upon the American taxpayer. But the answer to our problems is not to simply build more tents in the desert and to cut down on their accommodations. Indeed, I imagine that the court costs must be quite high, since inmates routinely challenge Arpaio’s authority to make the changes that he does. Arizona can’t realize this. It’s a state where they don’t care at all about recycling because they have miles and miles of desert just waiting to become a landfill. Build more landfills. Build more prisons. Problem solved.
Why don’t we attack the problem from a different angle? The problem is that we incarcerate more people in this country than the rest of the world. We have the highest documented incarceration rate (per capita) and the highest documented prison population in the world. Why should “tent city” house persons who were caught with some marijuana alongside rapists and murderers? Why do we continue to allow the death penalty in this country, despite its questionable “effectiveness” at deterring crime and its high price tag? At a certain point, we have to stop making these issues “moral” and just argue against the opposition based on costs. In the current recession, such an argument should have weight.
Of course, the larger issues are still out there. What we really have to consider in this country is the philosophy of punishment that underlies our current legal system. Why are we doing what we are doing? What is our purpose? These are the questions we must ask. This post has rambled on too long and I’m not ready to get into a full-fledged debate right now. But we have to consider whether the primary goal of incarceration is to rehabilitate the criminal, deter others from committing crimes, or simply a means to seek retribution against a criminal and to temporarily remove them from the streets. If we are merely seeking retribution and we don’t care about extending the basic rights & freedoms to inmates that our nation believes in, then by all means let Arpaio continue his war path. If we are trying to deter future crimes, then Arpaio’s approach doesn’t seem to be working. But perhaps if we kept Guantanamo around and ramped things up a bit, we could accomplish that as well. I know that our country has given up on rehabilitation a long time ago. But you don’t even have a chance if you stoop to new lows in your treatment of inmates. Not a chance.
