For much of his law enforcement career he worked as an undercover narcotics agent
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For much of his law enforcement career, he worked as an undercover narcotics agent. Looking at him now, this is hard to believe, for every molecule of his being screams "COP!" He is built like a barrel, with a jowly stump for a neck, a bulbous nose, a mouth that sneers down at the corners, and short grey hair, greased into a razor-sharp side parting. And he has cop eyes: invasive, guilt-inducing, unmistakable.With some trepidation, I ask whether he thinks that criminals can be rehabilitated "Sure I believe in rehabilitation," he says "I believe in rehabilitation through punishment. I want to make it so bad in my jail that no one will dare to commit another crime when they get out. I want bad guys to have nightmares about my jails." SOME members of the media have tried to dismiss Sheriff Arpaio as a regional aberration, a throwback to the Wild West. This is a comforting thesis for liberal sophisticates on the East Coast, and not without supporting evidence: one of Arpaio's first acts as sheriff was to start deputising armed citizens and organising them into crime-fighting posses, a few of whom ride around on horses, wearing cowboy hats and gold Deputy Sheriff stars. (Arpaio's primary duty is to run the county jail system, which incarcerates people ar-rested within Maricopa County; his department is also responsible for policing the whole county.) But Arpaio is no frontier relic.
He was born and raised in Massachusetts, and spent 30 years as a federal drug enforcement agent, rising through the ranks to become a senior administrator; section chief in Washington DC, deputy regional director for Mas-sachusetts, and regional director for Latin America, with an office in Mexico City. On the walls of his sleek, expensive office in downtown Phoenix, there are photographs of Arpaio with Lyndon Johnson, with Richard Nixon, with former president Echeverria of Mexico, and with numerous other foreign dignitaries.Nor is Maricopa County, Arizona, as wild and western as it might sound. There are a few, embattled pockets of traditional ranching culture left within the county's 9,000 square miles, but most of it is consumed by the sprawling metropolis of Phoenix, the ninth largest city in America (population 2.5 million), and the second-fastest growing (after Las Vegas). With its smog, its 3,000 gang members, its soaring rates of violent crime and general resemblance to a giant shopping mall, Phoenix is better understood by comparison to modern Los Angeles than to the Old West.
And the citizens of Maricopa County are a representative slice of the American electorate in the mid-1990s - which is to say that they are gripped by fear of crime and howling for tougher punishment. Eighty-one per cent of Americans think that the courts are "too lenient" on criminals, 75 per cent favour an expansion of the death penalty. Although 22 of the nation's largest cities reported falling crime figures last year, there is a widespread perception that the penal system coddles prisoners; federal prisons are derisively known as "Club Feds", places where criminals lounge around watching television and sculpting their muscles. Middle-class whites are angry about illegal immigration, welfare, the federal government, "the liberal news media" and the rate of taxation, but their primary fixation is violent crime - and the news media credit this mood with sweeping a Republican majority into Congress for the first time in 40 years.
Fear of crime, and its corollary, hatred of criminals, are running at unprecedented levels.It is doubtful if any American hates criminals as fervently as Sheriff Joe Arpaio. "We've got to get back to how we were," he says, "before drugs and gangs and decent law-abiding citizens locked up inside their own homes while the criminals roam the streets It should be the other way around. Lock up all the bad guys, punish them severely, and let decent people walk the streets in peace. I want to lock up more criminals than any other sheriff or police chief in America. At the moment I'm number six, but I'm determined to make number one."Talk like this has made Arpaio the nation's pre-eminent celebrity lawman, a veteran of more than 60 television talk shows, and so many newspaper interviews that he has lost count.
