Sheriff Joe Arpaio: Role Model for the World

Feeling a little sluggish in the springtime?  Move to Phoenix and get yourself incarcerated.  As of this month, a new program in Arizona's Maricopa County jails requires prisoners to pedal a stationary bike to generate, volt-for-volt, the electricity they'll use watching television. It's an hour of biking for an hour of tube. Feel the burn.

Pedal Vision, as the program is called, made news as only the latest in a long string of absurdities and outrages by Joe Arpaio, Sheriff of Maricopa Country. Arpaio runs what human rights activists characterize as the harshest jail system in the United States. Prisoners live in a tent city with little protection against Phoenix's burning hot weather. They are fed only twice a day at a cost of 15 cents a meal. There's no coffee, no salt and pepper, no cigarettes and no organized recreation.

That's not to mention the chain gangs 'staffed' by inmates forced to wear striped suits and pink underwear, or Arpaio's quest to take immigration enforcement into his own hands by targeting neighborhoods and people of color. Abuse of power allegations in that last regard have led the Attorney General's office to launch a "serious and ongoing" probe.

(Yes, that pink underwear link leads to a site where you can purchase your very own pink boxers and handcuffs to support Joe. Please don't.)

To the already impressive list of Reasons for Joe Arpaio's Notoriety, let me add one more: Brazilian prisons.

First, I should say that Arpaio's misadventures have not gone without note. His website — where you can enjoy a bobble-head doll Arpaio and watch webcasts of bookings — brags that the sheriff "has been profiled in over 2,000 U.S. and foreign newspapers, magazines, and TV news programs." If Arpaio loves the limelight, he has bathed in it. When, last October, the Department of Homeland Security revoked its agreement with Arpaio to collaborate on immigration enforcement, the move made international news. To Arpaio's claim of being America's Toughest Sheriff, none other than the New York Times editorial board counters that he is rather America's Worst Sheriff.

But I wasn't quite prepared for his global reach.

As a member of Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, I recently found myself in a disturbing conversation with a jailer in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. We spoke on a walkway overlooking a hall of cells so overcrowded, prisoners had to take turns to sleep. An overwhelming smell of mold, sweat and sh*t wafted up the 25 feet between us and the prisoners. Brazilian and international human rights activists are rightly appalled by the abysmal conditions in Brazilian prisons. This facility was no exception.

"You're from the U.S.?" he said. "You've got that guy out there in the desert. He holds people in tents in over 100 degrees. This is nothing compared to that."

Arpaio would be pleased. But we certainly shouldn't be. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, human rights abuses anywhere, and perhaps especially in the United States, are a threat to human rights everywhere.

Photo credit: Town of Fountain Hills, Arizona