Go directly to jail, do not pass "GO"

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the "tent city jail" creator in Arizona, has meals down to 40 cents a serving and charges the inmates for them. He stopped smoking and porn magazines in the jails. He took away their weights and cut off all but "G" rated 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 only to let in the Disney Channel and the Weather Channel. When asked why the Weather Channel he replied, “So they know how hot it's gonna be while they are working on the chain gang.”

He cut off coffee since it has zero nutritional value. When the inmates complained, he told them, "Look, this isn't the Ritz-Carlton. If you don't like it, don't come back." He bought Newt Gingrich's lecture series on videotape and piped into the jails. When asked by a reporter if he had any lecture series by a Democrat, he replied that a Democratic lecture series might explain why a lot of the inmates were in his jails in the first place.

With temperatures being even hotter than usual in Phoenix (recently a new record of 116 degrees was set), the Associated Press reports, “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 years. "It's inhumane." Arpaio, the tough-guy sheriff who created the tent city and long ago started making his prisoners wear pink and eat bologna sandwiches, is not one bit sympathetic. He said Wednesday that 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!"




Edited by max 2005-08-05 9:29 AM