Yeah, so I watch TV. I realize it's very much in vogue these days to disavow the boob tube completely and pretend that reading vampire novels or blogs is somehow decisively more intellectual and desirable, but I won't lie: I like my TV.
The only things I can usually be bothered to watch are documentaries, á la History and National Geographic, and sports. Generally speaking, the two don't overlap. This summer, amidst the most boring NHL off-season ever, it looks like they might, and in a totally unexpected way.
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Last February, Edmonton Oilers goaltender
Nikolai Ivanovich Khabibulin was arrested for drunk driving in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he was recently convicted and faces a minimum 30-day sentence.
Khabibulin won the Stanley Cup with the Tampa Bay Lightning back in '04.
Here's what TSN has to say:
The Russian was convicted on three counts last month and received a minimum 30-day sentence. His lawyer immediately appealed but didn't say on what grounds. The appeals process could last months or even a year.
If jailed, it's possible Khabibulin could serve his time at Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Tent City prison in the Arizona desert.
Ah, Tent City. The National Geographic Channel has run Lockdown quite a few times, and I think I've seen pretty much all of it. I find all these prison shows fascinating, especially now that I'm an ex-con myself, and I do admit I particularly remember the Lockdown episode on "Sheriff Joe's" Tent City.
Lockdown is just like any other prison documentary on the Discovery/National Geographic channels: scenes of prison life that the editors probably imagine are harrowing, prison guards speaking law enforcement jargon and most importantly, a heavy, dramatic voiceover. In the "Tent City" episode, they made a point of finishing each and every segment with the words "...in Tent City." I imagine it's done for dramatic effect, but quite frankly, it's ridiculous. We totally lost our composure after the third time, and probably spent the next week finishing every conversation with "...in Tent City."
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None of this should distract us from the fact that there's actually nothing funny at all about Joe's tent city. To be specific, Tent City is an outdoor extension of Maricopa Jail, where Sheriff Joe mostly houses inmates suspected of crimes and awaiting trial. They live in primitive conditions on a yard where summer temperatures regularly exceed 40°C.
Here's TSN's summary of one inmate's experiences:
Shaun Attwood, a recent inmate from Britain, has written a book on his experiences and told The Guardian newspaper heat-related health problems are the mild part of the punishment. He wrote of toilets clogged with yellow-brown waste, mouldy sandwiches and prisoners shooting up crystal meth or heroin.
The bugs, he said, were the worst.
"I couldn't believe all the cockroaches," Attwood told The Guardian. "I couldn't sleep with them crawling on me. They tickle your hands and limbs and go in your ears to eat your earwax. You can cover yourself with a sheet, but it's so hot, you sweat all day and you get skin infections and bedsores, especially on your buttocks.
"Having the cockroaches crawling on me gave me a nervous breakdown."
Of course, where Khabibulin's from, they have some experience of these things, but it still seems a little harsh.
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Harsh, however, is exactly how Joe Arpaio likes it. He's an obnoxious, hateful man who shamelessly promotes himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff". Arpaio is the embodiment of the "tough on crime" approach. In addition to his outdoor prison, Arpaio has re-introduced chain gangs and other public humiliations for prisoners.
As an additional humiliation, he makes male prisoners wear pink clothes:
In my opinion, it tells you everything you need to know about a man if he considers wearing pink a punishment.
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It's not only Sheriff Joe's jail that attracts attention. Just this July, his department conducted a high-profile sweep for illegal immigrants (story), featuring 100 men and truck armed with a .50 cal machine gun.
Just as well he didn't bring a Warthog.
I can't, for the life of me, imagine how a Sheriff's Department can possibly need a .50-caliber machine gun. The .50-caliber rounds have enough penetrative power to make using a weapon like that in any built-up environment a serious hazard, and if they're out in the desert catching illegal immigrants, surely their personal weapons are enough? There's a throwaway quote in the article about illegal immigrants having AK-47s, but even if they do, bringing a heavy machine gun is just ridiculous.
He also has an APC, shown in action here:
The action in question is causing $4,000 worth of damage to a car during a botched SWAT raid on a suburban home. SWAT team members raided a house, set it on fire, and lost control of their APC, which ran into a parked car. As the inhabitants of the house came out, the SWAT officers stopped their puppy from leaving the house and forced it back inside with a fire extinguisher, where it died in the fire. According to the original news report, they later laughed about killing the dog.
As a side note, the dog killing isn't specifically a Sheriff Joe issue. As Radley Balko keeps pointing out, it's becoming routine in America for police officers to shoot dogs for no particular reason.
The purpose of Sheriff Joe's raid was, officially, to look for "a stockpile of illegal automatic weapons and armor-piercing pistol ammunition". They found one handgun and one antique shotgun, both of which were properly licensed. The theoretical justification was that one of the inhabitants had failed to appear in court on traffic citations.
That's being tough on crime: if you don't show up for a court date on a traffic case, the police murder your dog.
His most visible police actions have been massive sweeps for illegal immigrants, before Arizona's controversial new immigration law even comes into force, reminiscent of the 1997 Chandler Roundup.
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Arpaio's philosophy is that prison needs to be made so unpleasant that no-one will ever want to come back. In his mind, this will decrease crime, as will being "tough", as seen above. This approach once made him wildly popular in both Arizona and around the US, and now it seems that his methods are bearing fruit.
According to lobby group America's Voice, violent crime in Maricopa County has increased dramatically under Sheriff Joe. In case you think that sounds suspiciously liberal, here's what the Goldwater Institute's paper, Mission Unaccomplished, had to say about Sheriff Joe:
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is responsible for vitally important law-enforcement functions in one of the largest counties in the nation. It defines its core missions as law-enforcement services, support services, and detention.
MCSO falls seriously short of fulfilling its mission in all three areas. Although MCSO is adept at self-promotion and is an unquestionably “tough” law-enforcement agency, under its watch violent crime rates recently have soared, both in absolute terms and relative to other jurisdictions. It has diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration and in reducing crime generally, and to extensive trips by MCSO officials to Honduras for purposes that are nebulous at best. Profligate spending on those diversions helped produce a financial crisis in late 2007 that forced MCSO to curtail or reduce important law-enforcement functions.
In terms of support services, MCSO has allowed a huge backlog of outstanding warrants to accumulate, and has seriously disadvantaged local police departments by closing satellite booking facilities. MCSO’s detention facilities are subject to costly lawsuits for excessive use of force and inadequate medical services. Compounding the substantive problems are chronically poor record-keeping and reporting of statistics, coupled with resistance to public disclosure.
Simply put, Sheriff Joe's regime doesn't work. Studies show that his "sweeps" don't work. In 2008, the mayor of Phoenix drew attention to the fact that there were 40,000 outstanding felony arrest warrants in Maricopa County; while Sheriff Joe's posse was rounding up Hispanics, wanted felons weren't being arrested.
In general, routine police work is being seriously neglected in favor of Arpaio's publicity stunts. The 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting was awarded to two journalists, for an article on precisely that. It can be read here.
Response times, arrest rates, investigations and other routine police work throughout Maricopa County have suffered over the past two years as Sheriff Joe Arpaio turned his already short-handed and cash-strapped department into an immigration enforcement agency, a Tribune investigation found.
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What about jail, then? According to a report by Amnesty International, "it is clear that the tents provide serious environmental hazards which make them unsuitable for inmate housing." In addition:
A major concern is the security of both staff and inmates in the tent areas. There are no video cameras in the tents and no sight lights, and if the flaps of the tents are down guards are unable to see into or through the tents, putting them into a potentially hazardous situation if they need to go in to check or respond to an incident. Although MCSO officials told Amnesty International that the tents were "low maintenance", others have said that the In-Tent facilities require greater security than hard cell facilities because of their open design, ready availability of materials that can be used as weapons (including rocks, tent poles, etc) and lack of segregation between violent and non-violent inmates. Amnesty International was told that there were regular bouts of inmate-on-inmate violence in the tents. Yet, alarmingly, the tents have no mechanism to alert prison staff in case of an emergency. Traditional facilities would have some form of alarm system to ensure a swift response.
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The security risks are increased by the fact that the In-Tents facilities are chronically understaffed.
Just for his sake, I hope Nikolai Khabibulin doesn't end up in Tent City. Frankly, I hope no-one does. For Sheriff Joe, treating inmates inhumanely isn't a by-product of his budget or anything else at all; it's entirely intentional. Here's what the ACLU had to say on one particular publicity stunt of his:
Sheriff Joe's Inhumane Circus
His latest taxpayer-financed media stunt involved the "forced march" of undocumented inmates who are serving out their criminal sentences. Sheriff Arpaio closed down the city streets so that everyone could witness their public humiliation as they walked in chain gangs from a "hard" jail to the infamous Tent City, where they will be forced to endure unsafe conditions including summer months with temperatures of upwards of 120 degrees.
Not only was this inhumane, but violated international human rights principles — not to mention American values — that require us to treat people who are incarcerated with dignity and respect. But Sheriff Arpaio has absolute contempt for the dignity of the people in his custody and demonstrates this by treating people like circus animals.
Though he claims otherwise, Arpaio wasn't motivated by budgetary or security concerns to march shackled immigrants to the Tent City; he was motivated by the opportunity of self-aggrandizement and the promotion his anti-immigrant agenda. For those reasons, and for those reasons alone, he chose to re-route traffic and waste dwindling law enforcement resources.
So far, a study has showed no difference in recidivism rates under Joe Arpaio's regime. So when this is combined with the rising crime rate, it seems that Sheriff Joe's program of systematic humiliation and ill-treatment isn't achieving any ulterior motives at all.
The more one reads about Sheriff Joe, the more one comes to believe that these policies aren't in place to prevent crime. They seem to be ends in themselves. Here's another ridiculous example from the ACLU.
ACLU: Let's Do Some Math, Sheriff Joe
Yesterday, I argued in Maricopa County Superior Court about whether Sheriff Joe Arpaio, "America's Toughest Sheriff," can block inmates' access to abortion. The specific issue is whether the sheriff can demand that inmates who seek abortion care prepay $300 a day in transportation and security costs. If an inmate can't come up with the money, she will be forced to carry the pregnancy to term. Of course, Sheriff Arpaio doesn't require inmates seeking other medical care to prepay for transport and security costs. We argued it is unconstitutional to make access to the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy conditional on the ability to pay hundreds of dollars. Fortunately, the judge agreed.
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But the most telling part of yesterday's argument came when the judge asked us to do some math. He asked both parties how many hours since June each of us worked on the case - we agreed it was at least 40 hours each. He then assumed an hourly rate of $250 an hour and asked us to calculate the total. The answer? A lot of taxpayer money is being spent on a policy that may cost the Sheriff a few hundred dollars a year given how few women request abortion access.
Then the judge asked the question that sums it all up - he asked the sheriff's attorney to explain "the real reason" behind the policy. Clearly, it can't be that the sheriff is really worried about $300 a year.
The sheriff's attorney didn't really respond.
The same question could be asked of Arpaio's immigrant sweeps, or his advocacy of barbaric prison conditions. Does he really believe these policies are going to bring about positive results, or is he doing this for its own sake?
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Inefficiency and dubious ends aren't the whole story, either. During Sheriff Joe's time, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office has become embroiled in a number of controversies. They're currently under investigation by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations, and by the FBI for abusing his power to attack his political rivals. Sheriff Joe has started several investigations against politicians and media representatives who have criticized him. Only one investigation resulted in a conviction, when the former school superintendent of Maricopa County pleaded guilty to the crime of patronage: namely, getting her daughter a summer job.
I re-iterate that Sheriff Joe has time to investigate an improperly acquired summer job, but not the 40,000 felony arrest warrants.
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All in all, Sheriff Joe's "tough on crime" regime looks more and more like an elaborate joke, driven by the attention-seeking megalomania of one man. It's a sad indicator of the state of public discussion on crime and law enforcement that a buffoon like Arpaio remains popular, despite the rather obvious fact that none of his methods work. Sheriff Joe isn't the only example of the general public preferring macho posturing to effective policy.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with crime and law enforcement policy.
