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"My
jail is no hotel"
Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio detains
lawbreakers in tents in the desert, denies them coffee, cigarettes and TV and
makes them wear pink underwear. A visit in Arpaios "Tent
City".
Published
in BERLINER ZEITUNG MAGAZIN, November 2003
Autographs
for the inmates: Joe Arpaio
is a bit of a
celebrity in his tent city.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Jail wardens chain
up female members of a chain gang.
In pink under
the tarpaulin: Male inmates in tent city.
Photos: Nina Rehfeld
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The road leading toward Sheriff
Joe Arpaios Tent
City runs through a suitably grim neighborhood on the southwestern
border of Phoenix:
Naked storage houses, empty lots, and junkyards line the street, plastic
wrappers and newspaper pages caught in barbed wire flutter frantically in the
wind. Just a few miles before 27th
Avenue bumps into the South Mountains,
Durango Street
crosses, and a few feet to the right, Estrella Jail
complex looms.
It contains the Juvenile Detention Center, a section where unsentenced suspects await their trials, and the
notorious Tent City:
the jail of tents in the midst of the Arizona
desert.
The way inside leads through a double steel lock. It leads into a
concrete labyrinth. A young detention officer in a tan uniform leads the way
through the corridors to the women´s day room: a
vast, tiled hall with bolted down tables and chairs and the coziness of a launderette. On the far end, the exit to
the yard – the tents, where currently 1805 inmates do time. 310 of them are
women.
Surrounded by 12-foot wire fences, the inmates sloop on their narrow
bunks, reading, talking, dozing - 20 or 40 to a tent. Shampoo bottles,
dog-eared books and other small possessions are tucked between the mattresses
and steel frames of empty bunkbeds. A charity event
has drawn a number of volunteers to the adjacent yard, where a local
hairdresser cuts the women´s hair to make wigs for
cancer-kids in Florida.
Just behind the makeshift hair salon, the fence of the men´s
ward rises into the blue sky. Happy for the distraction, the guys are
watching the event from their bunks.
In the middle of the hair cutting yard stands a short elderly man. He
wears slacks, a jacket and a tie that sports a small golden gun. Next to him,
a woman in striped prisoner´s clothes. This is the
man who invented all this, who proudly refers to himself as “America´s toughest sheriff”, whose popularity amongst the
people of his county is remarkable: Joe Arpaio.
“Want an autograph? Here ya go”, he tells the
woman. Sheriff Joe pulls a pen from his jacket and scribbles his signature
onto the face of a post card. Within the panning range of a cameraman
recording the cancer kids event for a local
TV-station, Arpaio flaunts the great gestures of a
star. The woman in stripes says her thank you and trudges off in her pink
socks and fainted red plastic sandals. Arpaio turns
around and explains: “Inmates who want to write home, have to do it on these
postcards. I´m on all of them. And I autograph
most.”
The postcard features Arpaio, hands on his
hips and a revolver in his belt, next to a sheepish giant in pink boxers.
Between them stands a sign reading: “Tent City today: hard work, crew cuts,
35 cent meals, educational TV, pink underwear, 135 degrees. No coffee, no
cigarettes, no movies, no girlie magazines. If you don’t wanna
do the time, don´t do the crime.”
The postcard is not a joke. Arpaios made his
jail inmates wear pink undies when six years ago a
couple of delinquents were caught trying to smuggle out the stencilled white
jail underwear. “Why pink? Cause they hate pink! Why would I give them
something they like?” The sheriff makes a point out of making the inmates´
lives as miserable as possible. They should never want to return.
Tent City inmates receive only two meals a day. Flaccid baloney sandwiches, a pack
of crackers, a plum and a small carton of milk in the morning, stew and
potatoes at night. Television is limited to political programs and the
weather channel, cigarettes and coffee are banned, as are men´s
magazines. Male inmates are required to shave daily and cut their hair so the
ears and neckline are visible. For women, braids or ponytails are a must.
Rough language and cusswords are not tolerated, detention offiers are
to be addressed as “Ma´am” and “Sir”. Mouthing off
or misbehaving toward a detention officer will put you on water and “bread”,
a gooey substance of basic nutritional value. And anyone breaching the rules
invites restrictions for his or her whole tent. Serious infringements as
fights or cigarette-smuggling will lead directly to lockdown – a
23-hour-a-day confinement to a tiny cell of four which can last from
typically thirty days through your entire sentence.
„I suppose you serve your prisoners in Germany steak and pizza with
anchovies“, Arpaio snaps, „I´ve
heard as much. Well, my jail is no country club. See that sign over there?”
He points to a Motel sign erected in the middle of the yard: “Vacancy”, the
neon tube signals – we always have room for more.
Sheriff Joes motel is quite uncomfortable. To
relieve themselves from the singing heat – today´s
95 degrees are almost cool for an October day – all the inmates can do is
roll up the tent flaps. Even if that invites a sharp stench: Tent City
is located by a landfill, therefore, the land upon which the jail was erected
was free. Arpaio invested a mere 12000 dollars for
this jail, “and that´s only cause I was nice enough
to install electricity.”
He suddenly looks up with a worried expression. “Is the sun too much
for you?” But this is no display of gentleman manners. Arpaio
carefully chose his spot in the middle of the sun-beat yard to make his guest
feel the relentless heat. He likes to sell his jail rougher than it already is.
“In the summer, we have 135 degrees here, and probably more than that in the
tents.” In reality, Phoenix
had a record temperature of 117 this year.
Surprisingly, the inmates seem to find the tents less appalling than
shocked critics from the outside. David, 23, a small, sinewy Hispanic, handselected for an interview by a grim young officer,
says: “I like it out here. It gives you the feeling of more freedom, and you´re out in the open. It does get hot in the summer,
but I´m in construction and I´m
used to that.” David is in Tent
City for violating the
probation he got for assault. His sentence is eight months.
A few feet further, Maureen, 36 and incarcerated for driving under the
influence of marijuana, takes off her hairdressing gown. She feels that “anything´s better than being locked in a cell with half a
dozen people.” And Jamie, 27, another probation violator, says: “I don´t know if they told you, but we have the air
conditioned day room, and they give us cold water. The only really hard thing
is the two meals a day.”
Tent City does have an overpriced
jail commissary, where the inmates can order candy, hamburgers or cosmetic
products. But until recently, this was only possible after a fee of thirty
dollars had been payed to the jail. Arpaio has been charging his inmates a dollar a day for
“room and board”. He says: “I suppose you have to pay for your own rent and
food. Huh? Well, why should the taxpayers come up for the criminals?”
But a month ago, he had to stop this policy. “Well, it is kind of a
rip-off”, he concedes, “since we pay less than 40 cents a day for the meals. It´s not fair to make those 60 cents profit.”
Various inmates have sued Arpaio for
infringement on their rights. Some took their cases all the way to the
Supreme Court. “When I took away the porno”, Arpaio
says, “they went all the way – I won that case. When I took away the coffee,
they went all the way – won that case.” The FBI, the Federal Justice
Department and Amnesty International have conducted investigations against Arpaio and his tents. No one could stop him yet.
„Won that case“, Arpaio booms, as if he were
swinging a sledgehammer. It sounds like the triumph of the righteous hero in
an old black-and white-Western. But even Phoenix in the gunslinging
heartland of the American southwest, is almost 140 years old today. And
Joseph M. Arpaio was born and raised in Massachussetts. He speaks with a heavy New
England accent and is only second-generation American, the son
of Italian immigrants. “Legal immigrants”, he emphasizes. His mother died at
his birth, and little Joe, splitting his childhood between “various Italian
families” and his father´s grocery store, decided
to become a cop when he was just a kid.
After high school he entered the military service and then embarked on
a career as a drug cop which led him from the streets of Washington and
Chicago to undercover operations in Turkey
and Mexico.
After 27 years with the US Drug Enforcement Administration DEA, Arpaio quit his cop job and joined his wife´s travel agency in 1982. Obviously, this was far
from fulfilling: In 1992 he made a spectacular comeback in law enforcement by
running for sheriff and winning the job. He is currently serving his third
term, and will run for a fourth in September 2004.
But the toughly Italo-American is a far cry from the sadistic monster that
some people portray him as, and even from the modern-day John Wayne, an image
he seems to want to embody. Arpaio is just a
slightly eccentric elderly gentleman whose plain pragmatism saves him from
considering the complexities of life. He takes his job literally: law
enforcement.
Joe Arpaio likes to govern Maricopa county,
at 3.2 million residents the third largest sheriff´s
district after Los Angeles
and Chicago´s Cook county, like an old-fashioned
autocrat. “I report to no one”, he says matter-of-factly. “Not to a governor,
not to any politician. You know that song by Frank Sinatra? ,I
Did it My Way´. It´s my favorite
song. I have no boss, I do exactly what I want to
do. And if the people don´t like it, well, then it´s time for me to go.”
But they like it. Up to
80 percent of Maricopa county´s voters support Arpaio, because he reduces the crime problem to a
simplistic system: you break the law, you pay for it. Sheriff Joe comes off
to his constituents as if he´s got it all under
control. Even if he´s only managing the problem out
of sight.
Tent City is crowded by
non-violent offenders serving one year or less. Thanks to an
incarceration-happy judicial system with mandatory sentencing and minimum
terms, conservative Arizona
has an inmate rate which grows seven times as fast as the state´s
population. “Drug addicts, drunken drivers and probation offenders are
crowding our prisons”, the daily newspaper “Arizona Republic”
recently lamented. The paper also cited criminal justice professor John
Hepburn from Arizona
State University:
“We lock up more and more people, with less and less rehabilitation programs
to offer.”
Tent City does offer a successfull anti-drug program named Alpha, and it boasts
the U.S.´s only in-jail high school. There are
parenting programs and reading sessions recorded for the inmates´kids
at home. But at the end of an inmate´s sentence, Arpaios jail simply spits him or her out on the street.
For drug offenders this
is especially difficult. Jamie says: “In here, many of us feel strangely
secure, cause we don´t
have to hustle the streets and all, to score drugs or whatever. But when it´s time to go home, some people are almost afraid.” Many
are sucked right back into their old patterns, and they simply come back
again and again. Jamie serves her fourth term here.
Sheriff Joe couldn´t care less. He likes to stress that his jails
contain over 3500 people more than there is room for. “People constantly tell
me that their jails aren´t so crowded. Know what I
tell ´em? Cause you don´t
catch the criminals! I´m only doing my job here.
And I do it right.”
Last year Joe Arpaio was among the most popular candidates for the
office of Governor. But he decided not to run. “I´m
a fighter at the front”, he says. “This is where I belong, and this is where I´m staying.” In June the tough Sheriff turned 71.
©
Nina Rehfeld
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