Joe Arpaios prison was a circus of cruelty. Now his values are spreading
By Paul Mason
What I remember most about Joe Arpaio’s jail is how easy it was to get in. We were interviewing people from the Hispanic community in Phoenix under siege from Arpaio’s cops. This was when they were routinely scooping migrants off the streets and – sometimes even when all their papers were in order – dumping them into immigration detention jails. I assumed the BBC would have trouble getting access to such a controversial institution, but within an hour of asking we were through the doors.
The jail was a tent camp: olive-green military canvas with the sides pulled up, dating from the Korean war. The prisoners – women were in a separate compound – all wore black and white striped overalls and, famously, bright pink underwear. Arpaio himself would later sign for each of my team a poster showing a brutish-looking prisoner wearing the pink underwear: it was designed, like the rest of the place, to humiliate and increase the mental torture.
The physical unpleasantness was plain to see. Our car dashboard told us the outside temperature was 114F (45.5C). The prisoners lay slumped, listless in the suffocating heat. The guard escorting us said: “Everything is done as cheap as possible. They get two meals a day: bologna [sausage] and cheap white bread. We, the guards, drink only out-of-date Gatorade for hydration.” And he proudly showed us the date on the bottle he was swigging from. At the slightest unauthorised physical movement – such as shading your head from the sun under a pink towel on the way to the bathroom – the guard would bark some insulting instruction at the offender until they froze.
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The jail, relentless police raids and stops of people who looked Hispanic, and the tirade of contempt and racial stereotypes that spewed out of Arpaio’s mouth when I interviewed him, were all designed to make life as difficult as possible for the migrant communities of Arizona. But the circus of cruelty was only the pretext for a bigger signal. Arpaio’s actions, over 20 years as sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, were designed to prove that the American far-right can defy the constitution and the federal government with impunity. That is what President Trump really sanctioned when he pardoned Arpaio last week: open defiance of the law.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/28/donald-trump-far-right-joe-arpaio
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