Dogs fed better than humans by Sheriff.
[Got this in email. I’ll find the original URL later. Meanwhile…
“I got meal costs down to 40 cents a day per inmate. It costs $1.15
a day to feed the department’s dogs.” –Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Do I really need to say anything more?
-Thomas]
Arizona Sheriff Runs World’s Only Female Chain Gang
Wed Oct 29,10:10 AM ET
By Alan Elsner, National Correspondent
PHOENIX (Reuters) - Sheriff Joe Arpaio boasts that he runs the only
all-female chain gang in history.
For the chief lawman of Maricopa County, which includes the 3
million residents of Phoenix and its satellite cities and suburbs,
presiding over the chain gang fits his self-declared image of being
the toughest sheriff in America.
Under Arpaio, the 8,000 inmates of the county jail system work seven
days a week, are fed only twice a day, get no coffee, no cigarettes,
no salt, pepper or ketchup and no organized recreation. Human rights
groups regard it as the harshest jail system in the United States.
They have to pay $10 every time they need to see a nurse. If they
want to write to their families, they have to use special postcards
with the sheriff’s picture on them. If their loved ones visit, they
see them through thick plate glass or over a video link.
Most inmates are serving sentences of a year or less for relatively
minor convictions or are awaiting trial because they could not make
bail.
They wear pink underwear and black and white striped uniforms.
Around 2,000 inmates live in tents under the blazing Arizona sun in
temperatures which last summer often exceeded 120 degrees
Fahrenheit. Even in mid-October, it was over 100 degrees.
“I got meal costs down to 40 cents a day per inmate. It costs $1.15
a day to feed the department’s dogs. Now, I’m cutting prisoners’
calories from 3,000 to 2,500 a day,” the sheriff said during a
recent tour of his tent city.
“Do you hear me?” he asked the inmates who surrounded him. “You’re
too fat. I’m taking away your food because I’m trying to help you.
I’m on a diet myself. You eat too much fat.”
Several prisoners told Arpaio they often received rotten food. “The
cheese is old. The meat has green spots. And the heat kills you,”
said Tom Silha, 42, serving nine months for fraud.
Arpaio told him he didn’t care. “If you don’t like it, don’t come
back,” he said. But jail spokeswoman Lisa Allen McPherson said that
60 percent of inmates did in fact come back for more than one term.
BURIAL WORK
Next morning at 6 a.m., 15 women assembled for chain gang duty. They
were padlocked together by the ankle, five to each chain, and
marched military style out to a van that transported them to their
work site — a county cemetery half an hour out of the city in the
desert.
The women had to bury the bodies of indigents who had died in the
streets or in the hospital without family and without the money to
pay for a proper funeral.
Father Bill Wack, a young Catholic priest, and Sister Mary Ruth
Dittman, were waiting for them. The first body was that of a baby,
in a tiny white casket, who did not even have a name.
Wack said a prayer for the baby and Dittman recited the 23rd Psalm
while some of the women silently wept. Then, they filled in the
grave and moved on to the next body.
Altogether, the women laid to rest six people, including two babies.
Jets from a nearby military base continuously blasted overhead,
interrupting the brief prayers.
“I was thinking as they lowered that casket into the ground, ‘Where
is the mother of this child?”‘ said Defonda McInelly, serving eight
months for check forgery.
“I think about my son, Chaz. He is 3. I miss him immensely. I don’t
have him come and visit me in here. He knows that mommy is in jail
and I don’t want him to see mommy for half an hour through a glass
window and then be dragged away.”
Father Wack said he did not particularly appreciate having the chain
gang assist with the burials.
“It’s free labor and it’s undignified. How is this helping to
rehabilitate anyone?” he said.
The women all volunteered for chain gang duty to get out of lock-
down, where four prisoners are shut in a cell 8 by 12 square feet 23
hours a day. If they spend 30 days on the chain gang, picking up
trash, weeding or burying bodies, they can get out of the punishment
cells and back to the tents.
“It feels weird being seen in public, chained up together, wearing
stripes. People honk their horns or shout at you,” said Tylisha
Chewning, who was jailed for violating probation after renting a car
and failing to return it for two months.
Arpaio, who was elected sheriff in 1992 promising to be tough on
crime and intends to seek a fourth term next year, said he wanted to
start a chain gang for juveniles soon too.
“I use it for deterrence to fight crime. I put them right on the
street where everyone can see them. If a kid asks his mother, she
can tell them this is what happens to people who break the law,” he
said.
But critics said there was no evidence that chain gangs had any
deterrent effect.
“The intent is humiliation of the inmates and political
grandstanding for the public. It makes the sheriff look tough and
that’s all it does,” said Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, a
Washington think-tank which promotes reduced reliance on
incarceration in the justice system.
Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch said Arpaio was clearly
unfamiliar with or did not care about international treaties that
set human rights standards binding on all U.S. officials.
“These laws prohibit cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and
punishment, yet Arpaio takes great pride in subjecting prisoners to
degrading treatment,” she said.
