Last week I was sent one of those gung-ho
emails about a US sherrif who had solved the problem of stray dogs in his
district by getting prisoners to care for them, thus saving the county money
(costs fell from $10m to $3m a year, it claims), providing care and an adoption
scheme for the strays, and training prisoners in animal care.
The email says his policies are so popular,
he keeps getting re-elected, term after term (by a 83% majority last time, it
claims).
It goes on to praise another scheme whereby
prisoners grow their own food and earn income via a farm, which also produces
fertiliser for a Christmas tree nursery, which, in turn, creates more income.
All sounds perfect.
Too
good to be true, in fact.
So I thought I'd check a few facts, to make
sure it wasn't all fantasy.
Search for "Joe Arpaio" or
"Maricopa County" and you'll find he's real enough – but there's much
more to the story than that.
 |
| Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Picture: Rolling Stone magazine |
Republican Sherrif Joe, now 80, is of
Italian heritage and was born in Springfield, Mass., and has been head of
law enforcement of Maricopa County, Arizona, for nearly 20 years. Before
that he served in the US army and was a Fed with the DEA, serving overseas as
well as in the US.
Sadly he undermines my theory that
Americans who travel are more moderate than those who spend their whole lives
in the US.
First elected in 1992, his eccentric tough
stance has gradually been overshadowed by claims against the Sheriff’s Office
of discrimination, corruption and financial irregularities.
•
In 1993 he launched the idea of
a tent city for inmates to solve overcrowding problems, leading to complaints
of breach of human rights as temperatures in the remote Arizona desert setting
topped 100ºF (38ºC+) and often reached 120ºF (49ºC). He told them to suck it up
– if it was good enough for US forces defending their country, it was good
enough for convicts. Tours of Tent City can be booked; apparently all 2,126
inmates have been checked to ensure ‘dangerous and predatory individuals’ are
not placed there, so apparently this is the ‘soft’ option.
•
He stopped prisoners’ access to
coffee (saving $150,000 a year, he claims), cigarettes, hot lunches, TV (except
for education broadcasts in the evening) and banned porn.
•
He makes prisoners pay for
meals. According to Arpaio in 2003, it cost $1.15 a day to feed each guard dog,
and 40c a day to feed each inmate.
•
Convicts must also pay $10 for
each visit to a nurse.
•
If they want to write to their
families they have to use special postcards with the sheriff’s picture on them.
•
In 1995 he reinstated chain
gangs, initially in striped uniforms with pink underwear.
•
In 1996, to make it fair, he
included female inmates too. Burial duty at the local cemetery was one regular
task for women.
•
He later launched a supposedly
world-first juvenile volunteer chain gang, in which volunteers can earn high
school credits towards a diploma.
•
Inspired by the pink undies
idea, in 2007 he forced men convicted of drunk driving to clean up the city in
pink jail suits.
•
The animal adoption sanctuary is housed in a former jail. Animals are supposedly rescued for abusive
situations – a scary number of pit bulls are up for adoption, and a few
seem to have dodgy temperaments, according to their details..
However
attractive some of those ideas may be, critics find plenty to complain about.
 |
| Tent City, as it's called on www.mcso.org |
Does
the tough regime work? When inmates complain,
Arpaio loves to retort: "If you don't like it, don't come back." But,
according to CNN, jail spokeswoman Lisa Allen McPherson said that 60 per cent
of inmates did in fact come back for more than one term.
Does
it save money? Running costs have certainly
dropped, but the legal bills have been hefty. Among the hundreds of
inmate-related lawsuits, and at least $43 million paid in settlement claims,
$8.5 million was paid to the family of Scott Norberg who reportedly died of
asphyxiation as he struggled with guards in 1996; $2 million to the family of a
blind man who died after being beated in jail, and $1.5 million was awarded to
an inmate denied medical treatment for a perforated ulcer (he was arrested for
driving with a suspended license). In several cases, it was alleged Arpaio’s
office destroyed digital video evidence.
Do
the chain gangs work? Catholic priest Father Bill
Wack, who receives help from female prisoners in burying those too poor to pay
for funerals – often babies and itinerants – told CNN: “It’s free labor and
it’s undignified. How is this helping to rehabilitate anyone?”
Prisoners’
calories have been cut from 3,000 to 2,500 a day,
but some complain that food is rotten, with spots of mould on meat and cheese.
Does
the office protect and serve? “Integrity, accountability
and community” is what is plastered across Arpaio’s website, www.mcso.org, which encourages citizens to vote
for the “mugshot of the day” and ranks lists of ‘deadbeat parents’, ‘sex
crimes’, alongside boasts of how many illegal migrants have been detained. Trouble
is, the mugshots are of people booked within the last three days, not those
necessarily found guilty of any crime. While the page declares the caveat
‘Pre-trial inmates are innocent until proven guilty!’ one wonders how much mud
sticks. Or if juries can truly claim to be impartial (and how can seven people
have been charged with kidnapping in one day!?)
There are a whole host of accusations that
have been leveled against Arpaio over the past 20 years.
Immigration
issues hit
Arpaio, never one to shrink from publicity,
also hit headlines more recently when he challenged Barack Obama about his US-citizenship, demanding to see his birth certificate.
His campaign against illegal migrants has
led him to fighting two sets of legal action as a result of his so-called
“crime suppression sweeps” that have led to complains of police targeting
Hispanics for ID checks, traffic stops and detention. In December 2011, the US
Justice Department said it had found cause to believe the sheriff’s office “has
engaged in a pattern of misconduct that violates the Constitution and federal
law” and launched civil action against him.
He is also facing a class action of racial
discrimination brought by a number of Hispanics in Arizona, a battle that has
been simmering since at least 2009.
 |
| Joe and Ava Arpaio in 2011. Picture: Gage Skidmore |
Millions
mis-spent
If that was not enough, there’s the
accusations of misspending millions of dollars in taxpayer money.
Complaints laid in 2011 after a county budget office audit found Arpaio had used about $100 million designated for
jail funds to pay deputies’ salaries.
Calling the findings a “payroll discrepancy
issue”, Arpaio pledge to fix the problem internally and resisted calls for him
to resign.
Other accusations were that there were
frequent errors in managing inmate’s cash accounts, with deficits of hundreds
of dollars in some cases; that the office spends 3-to-6 times more that other
jurisdiction for extraditions; that outside bank accounts prevented county
officials from monitoring transactions; and that sheriff’s officials charged
“unusual expenses” to county -issued credit cards, including first-class
upgrades to flights, entertainment, and stays at luxury hotels.
But wait - there’s more!
In late 2010 Arpaio's 2012 re-election
campaign committee was fined for sending out flyers deemed illegal by the
county election department's finance committee because they sought the defeat
of a political opponent.
Don’t forget the steak knives!
For about four years the US Justice
Department has been investigating Arpaio and his former chief deputy, David
Hendershott and former County Attorney Andrew Thomas and his deputy Lisa
Aubuchon. While the exact nature of the investigation was ever revealed, Thomas
and Aubuchon were both disbarred earlier in 2012.
The gist of the proceedings is that those
officials used their positions and power to press criminal charges against
their political enemies: four judges were accused of racketeering by Thomas and
Arpaio in December 2009, plus other cases.
However, in September the US Attorney’s
Office in Phoenix announced it would not be filing federal or state criminal charges.
It seems there are no federal statutes that
cover the alleged actions, and both sides complain the action (or lack of) is
politically motivated.
Embezzlement
charges
Previously Federal prosecutors ran an
investigation in the late 1990s into allegations that David Hendershott (Arpaio’s
deputy) embezzled funds from the sheriff’s office's pink-underwear sales and
ordered surveillance of the sheriff's political enemies, including the former
county attorney.
That probe ended with the U.S. Attorney's
Office sending a letter to Hendershott clearing him of wrongdoing. The letter
was issued in part because of the media attention the investigation received at
the time.
On the Arizona Central website next to this
story, Arpaio’s campaign team is running an advert offering a link to the true
story.
Civil
rights abused?
Locally he is loved. He boasts a “posse” of 2,500 ‘volunteers’ (vigilantes?) who go after
prostitutes, graffiti artists and criminals at shopping malls (says CNN).
In charge of 7,500-10,000 inmates, he
employs more than 3,400 staff, making Maricopa the nation’s third-largest
sheriff’s department.
In April 2005, Arpaio's deputies arrested
an Army reservist who held at gunpoint a group of Hispanics whom he believed
were undocumented immigrants (writes the Huffington Post). The sheriff said the reservist had no right to take that step. The
reservist was never prosecuted.
But others believe the degrading treatment
breaks international treaties protecting human rights, which supposedly bind
all US officials.
"The intent is humiliation of the
inmates and political grandstanding for the public," said Marc Mauer of
the Sentencing Project, a Washington think-tank that promotes reduced reliance
on incarceration in the justice system. “It makes the sheriff look tough and
that's all it does.”
Either
way, it’s makes for great media.
Two Phoenix New Times editors were arrested by Maricopa deputies after a run-in with
Arpaio; the case was dropped the next day and the prosecutor fired.
Another local paper, the East Valley Tribune, won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of five articles run in 2009 criticizing the decline in
regular police protection due to the increased focus on arresting illegal
immigrants. A series of sex cries are among those his agency allegedly failed
to investigate.
So at 80 will he stand again for election?
You betcha, although it’ll be his toughest campaign. According to the
Huffington post, he has $4.2 in his campaign fund, and is still favourite, The
AzCentral website puts his fundraising at more than $7.5 million, mostly for
out-of-state donors, while his main opponent, former police Sgt. Paul Penzone is battling him with about $72,000.
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