You’re in jail; you’re not in a hotel
I thought I remembered seeing a 60 Minutes about Arpaio long ago. Sure enough – in 2001.
While Arpaio has received nationwide attention in the last few years for his hard-line stance against illegal immigration — and for promoting the lie that President Obama was born outside the U.S. — he made a name for himself in Arizona years ago.
60 Minutes profiled Arpaio in 2001, when he was eight years into his tenure as sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. At the time, correspondent Morley Safer called him a “big-time publicity hound” who had “become famous ’round the world as just about the meanest man in the West.”
His reputation in 2001 was that of a tough-as-nails jailer who believed in punishment more than rehabilitation — and above all, in the humiliation of prisoners, reported Safer.
The Phoenix jail 60 Minutes visited with Arpaio was something of tent city, comprised of old Korean War tents with nothing to assuage the Arizona heat beyond holes in the canvas. Arpaio bragged to Safer that he spent more money on food for the jailhouse dogs than for inmates.
“They have to lose weight, too,” he said of the inmates. “They’re kind of heavy in there. I don’t see anybody dying around here.”
Arpaio got rid of the standard jailhouse uniform, dressing inmates in old-fashioned striped uniforms instead, and he used chain gangs for both male and female inmates.
Arpaio’s unorthodox approach turned more than a few heads; by 2001, Amnesty International, the ACLU and the Justice Department all condemned his methods. Donna Hamm, a former judge and then-prison reform advocate, told 60 Minutes the atmosphere of humiliation in Arpaio’s jails would only breed a meaner criminal.
Plus it’s wrong in itself.
SAFER: (Voiceover) It’s life under the big top in Phoenix’s tent city, one circus that never leaves town. Joe Arpaio, the P.T. Barnum of sheriffs, is an equal-opportunity jailer. Men and women are treated to the same miserable conditions.
ARPAIO: You’re in jail; you’re not in a hotel. You’ve got to pay your debt and that’s it. That’s what you’re here for. I’m tired of hearing about your complaints.
Unidentified Woman #1: We are human beings.
SAFER: (Voiceover) The place festers away between a dog pound and a local garbage dump. Since he was elected sheriff eight years ago, Arpaio has made tent city into one of the strictest jails in the country…
ARPAIO: All right, gentlemen. I need to see your IDs.
SAFER: (Voiceover) …which means no cigarettes, no coffee, no girlie magazines. Even National Geographic is doubtful. And then, of course, there’s the food.
Unidentified Man #2: For two days, we’ve been having cheese sandwiches.
ARPAIO: Grilled cheese?
Unidentified Man #2: No, it’s fake cheese.
Unidentified Man #3: No, it’s vegetable oil. It doesn’t even melt.
Unidentified Man #4: It turns to oil when it melts.
ARPAIO: I’m not a cook.
SAFER: You’ve boasted that you spend more on food for your jailhouse dogs than you do on your prisoners.
ARPAIO: I’m not going to lie about that. It’s $1.15 a day for the dogs. It’s only 90 to 95 cents a day for the inmates. But they get 3,000 calories. I’m on a 1,400-calorie diet. I think they can get by with 3,000.
SAFER: Yeah, because you wanted to lose a lot of weight.
ARPAIO: Well, they have to lose weight, too. They’re kind of heavy in there.
I don’t see anybody dying around here.
SAFER: (Voiceover) The food may not be so hot. How about the weather? As high as 120 degrees in the shade. Inmates live in old Korean War tents. The only air conditioning are the holes in the canvas.
ARPAIO: Uh-oh. Is that one there?
SAFER: That’s a big hole in that one.
ARPAIO: I don’t see any rain.
SAFER: (Voiceover) For prisoners who want to get away from this sweaty tedium, he offers outside work on the chain gang.
ARPAIO: (Voiceover) It’s the only time they ever work together. Of course, they have to. They’re hooked together. They learn discipline. They get up at 5. They have to clean their shoes. They have to have haircuts. They march, and they get on a chain gang. A great program.
SAFER: (Voiceover) And, of course, there’s the flashing neon vacancy sign, a constant reminder to inmates and visitors that there’s always room for one more.
ARPAIO: I will never change it to No Vacancy. Any cop or deputy sheriff wants to lock someone up, I will find room for them. There’s a lot of desert from here to Mexico.
SAFER: (Voiceover) An attitude that has proved irresistible to a string of get-tough Republicans: Bob Dole, Pete Wilson and George W., all perhaps suffering from poll envy. Joe’s approval rating hovers at 85 percent. And a delegation that doesn’t give a damn about polls: Chinese law enforcement officials drop in for some tips from Joe, who just brushed up on his Mandarin.
That’s former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the guy lionized by the current US president.
I must admit to being utterly perplexed. I simply cannot understand how what is being described there is not illegal. I mean, I assume it’s all legal since since he wasn’t hauled up in front of the beak 16 years ago. What happened to the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment?
Punishment is inherently at least on a spectrum with cruelty, so hard and fast bars on cruel punishment won’t ever happen. And unusual – well, he wasn’t doing more than using techniques that could be justified by cost benefits or necessity given resources, and ones that’d been applied before.
If it was illegal – and I’m not arguing it wasn’t, or certainly that it should have been! – it wasn’t purely on the basis of simple Constitutional law easily applied.
It also does not help that the United States approves of a whole lot of incarceration, and most voters and legal system officials regard convicts (or even anyone under arrest) as bad people deserving of plenty of mistreatment and certainly not of much sensitive regard. “Innocent until proven guilty” needs to be constantly repeated, because it won’t be acknowledged or followed without work, and the dominant theories of punishment are those of deterrence and retribution, with rehabilitation or restorative justice barely on most mental horizons. From the deterrence perspective, the more you violate a prisoner the better; from the retribution one, the more you regard the crime as heinous, the more you approve of making the perpetrator suffer.
How did Arpaio manage to lose his support? He lost his last election campaign in a county that went for Trump. Does that mean there’s something so corrupt and disgusting that even THAT collection of knuckle-dragging trash loses their appetite?
Jeff @2: Thanks. I get that; I suppose I just don’t really grok how things work in the US. The British Constitution (such as it is) is not such an overarching document as it is in the States. We (the public) don’t really think of it as the final authority on legality. Well, those of us who know that there actually is a British Constitution don’t think of it that way.
That said, I’m reasonably certain that the governor of a prison here in the UK who acted like Arpaio would soon find himself in a cell of his own.
At least, I hope that’s true…
I’m pretty sure the European Union (while you remain in it!) has some human rights provisions that are more detailed than the U.S. Constitution that way, so if nothing else, that may catch the hypothetical British Arpaio. And in a pinch, a vote in Parliament would settle anything and a word from the Home Secretary would do nearly as well, with the party in power easily held accountable as a result. The U.S. does not have that sort of clearly centralized authority combined with relatively easy electoral accountability, as a matter of design. (There are good reasons for that, certainly historically and even currently – what too many American ultra-patriots seem to think is that that is entirely a good thing, without a price to be paid for it.)
I suspect Arpaio lost his support because the county did not care to keep having their sheriff smacked down in court. Trump’s legal and business embarrassments hadn’t been in politics before he got elected, and the majority of voters (among those who bother to vote, AND are allowed to vote) of enough gerrymandered districts of enough electoral college voting blocs who support Trump… are too small a minority of the actual population to suffer unduly the cost burden of supporting him. They get 100% of their hate satisfaction out of him while paying a tiny fraction of the risk, embarrassment, and costs.
“While [we] remain in it”… Yeeeessssss. My personal view is that we won’t leave, but that we will suffer significant damage before we wake up and stop it.
Ever since Julius Treeza, as Home Secretary, first mooted the idea of taking us out of the ECHR (as EU members it would have been impossible, and may explain her zeal for Brexit), I have feared her gaining any more power. My fears are coming true.