Monday 18 March 2013

Joe Arpaio

On 15 April 2013, TIME magazine reported thus:
“Officials in Maricopa County, Ariz., said they intercepted a package intended for controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio that contained explosive materials… ATF officials said the postal employee thought it looked suspicious and a test revealed evidence of explosive residue. A subsequent X-ray scan revealed the package contained gunpowder…

Arpaio, whose controversial stance on undocumented immigration has earned him plenty of enemies, is no stranger to threats… He even once claimed a Mexican drug cartel put a $1 million price on his head…

The 80-year-old lawman, who describes himself as ‘America’s toughest sheriff,’ has served for the past two decades and is best known for the tough talk that made him a centerpiece of the undocumented immigration debate. He has logged more than 35,000 arrests of people who were accused of being in the country illegally.

So staunch was his position that the Department of Justice investigated him for racial profiling in 2010. He’s also built open-air tent cities to house prisoners at a cheaper cost to the county and ordered that inmates’ uniforms be changed to to pink…

More recently, he entrenched himself as part of the ‘birther’ movement, which has tried to disprove President Obama’s citizenship.”
There are many who don’t like Joe Arpaio. Obama fans, the PC Crowd and the criminals in his care, for example. However, he is VERY popular with his constituents. ‘America's Toughest Sheriff’ served in the Army from 1950 to 1953 and went on to become a cop with a reputation for fighting drug trafficking around the world. He concluded his career as Head of the DEA in Arizona.

In 1992, he campaigned to become the Sheriff of Maricopa County. From 1996, after his policies had earned him unprecedented praise and an 85 percent public approval rating, no one even bothered to run against him again.

In August 1993, he opened a ‘Tent City’ for convicted inmates. Over 2000 convicted men and women serve their sentences in a canvas incarceration compound. Arpaio doesn't believe in coddling criminals, frequently saying that jails should not be country clubs. He banned smoking, coffee, pornographic magazines, movies and unrestricted television in all jails.

Arpaio also launched ‘Hard Knocks High,’ the only accredited high school in an American jail. His ALPHA program teaches inmates to turn away from drugs. A high percentage of ALPHA graduates leave his jail clean and sober and rarely, if ever, return to jail.

He also has the nation's largest volunteer posse numbering 3,200 members. This is essentially free to taxpayers. Noel McNamara, the host of the US blog Crime Victims Advocate, says this:
"Sheriff Joe Arpaio… has jail meals down to 40 cents a serving and charges the inmates for them. He stopped smoking and porno magazines in the jails. Took away their weights. Cut off all but G movies. He started chain gangs so the inmates could do free work on county and city projects. Then he started chain gangs for women so he wouldn’t get sued for discrimination.

He took away cable TV until he found out there was a federal court Order that required cable TV for jails. So he hooked up the cable TV again but only let in the Disney channel and the weather channel. When asked why the weather channel he replied, so they will know how hot it’s gonna be while they are working on my chain gangs.

He cut off coffee since it has zero nutritional value. When the Inmates complained, he told them, 'This isn’t the Ritz/Carlton. If you don’t like it, don’t come back’.”
Associated Press reported thus in early 2004:
"About 2,000 inmates living in a barbed-wire-surrounded tent encampment at the Maricopa County Jail have been given permission to strip down to their government issued pink boxer shorts. On Wednesday, hundreds of men wearing boxers were either curled up on their bunk beds or chatted in the tents, which reached 138 degrees inside the week before.

Many were also swathed in wet, pink towels as sweat collected on their chests and dripped down to their pink socks. 'It feels like we are in a furnace,' said James Zanzot, an inmate who has lived in the tents for 1-1/2 years. 'It’s inhumane.'

Joe Arpaio, the tough-guy sheriff who created the tent city, long ago started making his prisoners wear pink and eat bologna sandwiches. He told all of the inmates: 'It’s 120 degrees in Iraq and our soldiers are living in tents too, and they have to wear full battle gear, but they didn’t commit any crimes, so shut your damned mouths'!"
So, who would you rather have running the country? Cameron, Clegg, Miliband? Brown? Blair?

Or Sherriff Joe Arpaio?

Yeah. That's what I thought.

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