It's No Party in the County Jail

By STEVE LOPEZ

You can come to Arizona for spring training if you want, or for the golf, or for sunsets the color of umbrella cocktails. But the best show isn't listed in any travel brochures.

The bumbling ex-Governor may be on his way to prison for a fraud conviction, and the most popular future candidate is a Wild West sheriff with his own legal problems who rose to fame on the strength of such practices as dressing inmates in pink underwear. Exhibition baseball can't compete.

Take a recent chilly night in Phoenix. It's raining to end the world, and Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose department was sued by the feds last year for excessive force against inmates, could not be happier. More than 1,000 prisoners in his custody are jammed into Korean War Army tents, and it must be miserable out there, he tells the enthralled Italian American Society at a sausage feed. "There's holes in the tents," he says for the fifth or sixth time that day, grinning like a kid.

Picture the bullnecked jailer in Cool Hand Luke, throw in some of former Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo, add a touch of Yosemite Sam and you get Sheriff Joe. And right now the boss hog, who averages a speech a day and makes Madonna look like a media wallflower, is wowing the retirees with lines about how he'd hate to be in a top bunk tonight.

Arpaio is the former federal drug agent who brought back chain gangs and black-and-white-striped convict outfits. He's the man who blacked out all television for inmates except G-rated flicks, the Weather Channel, Newt Gingrich videos and (opponents of torture may want to look away here) C-SPAN. He put up a neon vacancy sign at the tent city--get it?--served ostrich meat and green bologna to save tax dollars and made the inmates wear that pink underwear to make it harder for them to smuggle it out and to humiliate them. Sales of pink boxer shorts to civilians are a statewide sensation that helps pay for Joe's volunteer posse of 3,000, some of whom carry guns. But hey, Italians have been good thinkers going back to Michelangelo, haven't they? And, by God, "the tradition continues!" Joe bellows at the sausage feed, a fist thrust into the air. And then he lets the applause blow him out the door and into the rain.

Now 65 and possibly the most popular man in Arizona, Arpaio has had to fend off those who shoved polls in his face, telling him he was a shoo-in to become the next Governor. "I'm having too much fun as sheriff," he says.

But not as much as he did his first five years. Last month the Arizona Republic uncovered a second damning report by a U.S. Department of Justice consultant who condemned the use of restraint chairs, pepper spray, alleged hog-tying and the use of "unprovoked" and "unjustified" force.

Republic columnist David Leibowitz, a former Arpaio cheerleader, says he had a change of heart after examining details surrounding the death of an inmate who suffocated in 1996 while locked into a restraining chair with a towel over his head. Arpaio says he wants a jail visit to be a miserable experience; critics note that three-fourths of his inmates can't make bail and haven't even had a trial yet.

Mike Manning, an attorney handling a $20 million lawsuit for the family of the man who died in the restraining chair, is less of an Arpaio critic than you might guess. Get tough on crime? Fine with him. Why should inmates have cigarettes, coffee and skin magazines? The problem with Arpaio, the lawyer says, is that by publicly expressing glee over the suffering of inmates, "you're saying to your employees that they have a license to brutalize."

Arpaio denies that brutality is encouraged or tolerated. The U.S. Attorney's office says the sheriff has until May to clean up his office or they'll see him in court. Arpaio says he has already enacted the necessary reforms. But if his tough-guy, tax-saving tactics are as effective as he claims at discouraging crime, why has the average daily jail population gone from 4,846 to 6,485 on his watch? Why is he campaigning for a new jail? And why has the budget increased by roughly $10 million, to a total of $91.5 million?

Sheriff Joe has an answer to those questions. "Why are you talking to the enemy?" he bristles.

By the way, Joe wonders, did he mention the 40 death threats he has received? Yes. About 40 times. That he wrote a book titled America's Toughest Sheriff? Got it right here, Joe, along with some newspaper clippings. In his den at home, Arpaio keeps favorable clips filed chronologically under a bust of--guess who?

A visitor in his office mentions family in Germany, and Joe says he's famous there. He's famous everywhere, he says, brandishing a handy video of his international TV appearances. (Governor, hell. He ought to run for President.)

"You know what?" the sheriff says. "I should actually look at those numbers."