Joe Arpaio; A presidential pardon for the man who reigned with prejudice
Now, to be perfectly honest with you, I never actually met the Arizona Sheriff of Maricopa County. It just felt as if I had, because for a while there, maybe 10 or more years ago, he was a classic recurring interviewee on drivetime programmes in Ireland. Great talker who knew he was a great talker. Unexpected points being made. Outrageous points, and we’ll come back to that. But of course the interviewer would always strive for balance by putting the negative questions to Joe about his thesis.
The phraseology was a dead giveaway. Joe would grind to a halt, having made a particular point, maybe about how he dresses criminals in the prison he runs. He dresses them in pink underwear. The men, anyway. Not sure about the underthings he inflicts on his female prisoners. The men aren’t allowed to wear normal tighty whities. They have to wear tighty pinkies, in order to set them on the path of rectitude and redemption. As you know, pink underwear has a great track record in making evildoers see the error of their ways and turn towards reformation and redemption.
Anyway, when Sheriff Joe, on air, would make a strong point about, say, his banning of tighty whities, the Irish radio interviewer, resolute in his determination to be fair-minded, would ask a question presaged with a phrase like: ‘Some people would suggest…’ or ‘But couldn’t that have the reverse effect?’ You know the kind of question. The one that says to the broadcasting regulator that the presenter hasn’t bought into a fascist prisoner-abuser at all at all, but, contrariwise, is fearlessly putting to him the converse of the points he is making. In this ostensible exercise in balance and fairness, it doesn’t matter that Sheriff Joe is so used to these soft hardballs, he could knock them out of the park in his sleep.
It doesn’t and didn’t matter because, you know what? Sheriff Joe gave great radio. Anytime a presenter had him on the end of the line, you could hear the ratings ratcheting up as listeners texted each other or tweeted, saying: “Listen right now to X station, you won’t believe the guy who’s on.” Sheriff Joe was the ratings equivalent of a snowball on the side of an Alp. All you had to do was get him rolling and the listeners gathered around him, same as soft snow.
Listeners loved him. I know this because I did. I did unpaid publicity for him by telling people he was outrageous but a hell of a talker.
He was the Deep South lawman equivalent of Michael O’Leary, although, to give Michael O’Leary his due, the Ryanair boss has never tried to make passengers wear pink underwear. Nor has he ever singled out any group of passengers on race or gender and discriminated against them. Michael is an equal opportunities insulter. You push your luck with the take-on bag, he doesn’t care if you’re Conor McGregor or the Pope, he’s going to have it in for you.
Joe Arpaio is more selective, as a federal judge found a few weeks back when he convicted him of criminal contempt because Arpaio wouldn’t lay off his habit of racial profiling.
Racial profiling is a technical term for: “You look and sound Hispanic. Therefore you’re probably Mexican. Therefore you probably don’t have the right papers. Therefore, gotcha, and howdja like that, hombre?”
Arpaio had been told to stop jailing people simply because he suspected them of being in the country illegally. He kept doing it. The judge found him guilty and he stood a good chance of spending time in jail himself.
That just was the sort of setback in Joe’s life nobody should have to put up with when they’ve reached 85 years of age and been elected and re-elected six times by the good citizens of Maricopa County. I mean, come on, a popular guy with his finger on the pulse like Joe’s always had his finger on the pulse should be allowed to enjoy their golden years without the judiciary making bits of his great tradition, right? Bad enough that his successor as sheriff hardly had the decency to let the ink dry on his contract of employment before
pulling tent pegs out of the ground, that being the simplest way to do away with another great Arpaio tradition, that of housing prisoners in tents — more than 70 of them — pitched on land near the prison.
Perfectly good prison available, but putting bad guys out in the tropics at night with only leftover Korean War tents between them and the elements is going to be much more cost-effective and lead those bad guys to learn a serious lesson and make themselves a firm purpose of amendment. Stands to reason.
Doesn’t stand up to fact-checking, though. What his successor described as “the circus” of tents, starting in 1993, may have made for great pictures in TV footage, but that’s all they achieved. The prisoners who were supposed to be made miserable by bedding down in them found they quite liked being out of doors, even in great heat and on nights when it rained heavily. The people who did not like the tent approach to prisoner accommodation were the wardens, who had to wear heavy protective clothing in the exterior heat. More of them were required, also, to police the unorthodox tented prison. So the approach, while fascinating to media which never dug deeper than the Arpaio claims, cost the community more while achieving less.
It’s ending, according to a former attorney general for the state, meant “the days of Arizona being a place where people are humiliated or abused or ridiculed for the self-aggrandising of others are over”.
It might be assumed that the Arpaio days were over, too. He was out of a job since the voters of Maricopa had decided “enough, already, and finally declined to re-elect him”. He’d been found guilty of criminal contempt. His tents had come down and the prisoner underwear replaced.
The reign of a man who had operated on prejudice and contempt was over and, after he’d served a brief sentence, his fame would be over, too. The American justice system, with its traditional dislike of cruel and unusual punishment, would have reasserted itself.
But it takes one to know one. And it takes one to protect one. In this case, in pardoning Arpaio, a TV-created president rubbished the rule of law, preferring the rule of ratings.
The rule of ratings applies, with bells on, in Ireland just as it does in the US. Where we’re more fortunate is that neither our President nor our Taoiseach has the right to pardon wrongdoers. How blessed we are.
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