Sheriff Joe Arpaio - Arizona

Maricopa County, Arizona was spending approx. $18 million dollars a year on stray animals, like cats and dogs. Sheriff Joe Arpaio offered to take the department over, and the County Supervisors said okay.

The animal shelters are now all staffed and operated by prisoners. They feed and care for the strays. Every animal in his care is taken out and walked twice daily. He now has prisoners who are experts in animal nutrition and behavior. They give great classes for anyone who'd like to adopt an animal. He has literally taken stray dogs off the street, given them to the care of prisoners, and had them place in dog shows.

The best part? His budget for the entire department is now under $3 million.

[The writer and wife] adopted a Wemeriner from a Maricopa County shelter two years ago. He was neutered, and current on all shots, in great health, and even had a microchip inserted the day we got him. Cost us $78.

The prisoners get the benefit of about $0.28 an hour for working, but most would work for free, just to be out of their cells for the day. Most of his budget is for utilities, building maintenance, etc. He pays the prisoners out of the fees collected for adopted animals.

I have long wondered when the rest of the country would take a look at the way he runs the jail system, and copy some of his ideas. He has a huge farm, donated to the county years ago, where inmates can work, and they grow most of their own fresh vegetables and food, doing all the work and harvesting by hand. He has a pretty good sized hog farm, which provides meat, and fertilizer. It fertilizes the Christmas tree nursery, where prisoners work, and you can buy a living Christmas tree for $6 - $8 for the Holidays, and plant it later. We have six trees in our yard from the Prison.


Now he's in trouble with the ACLU again. He painted all his buses and vehicles with a mural that has a special hot line phone number painted on it, where you can call and report suspected illegal aliens. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement wasn't doing enough in his eyes, so he had 40 deputies trained specifically for enforcing immigration laws, started up his hot line, and bought 4 new buses just for hauling folks back to the border. He's kind of a 'Git-R Dun' kind of Sheriff.

To those of you not familiar with JOE ARPAIO:

He is the Maricopa Arizona county sheriff and he keeps getting elected over and over.

These are some of the reasons why:

He has jail meals down to 40 cents a serving and charges the inmates for them.

He stopped smoking and porno magazines in the jails.

He took away their weights and cut off all but 'G' 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. But he only let in the Disney Channel and the Weather Channel. When asked why the weather channel he replied, so they will know how hot it's gonna be while they are working on my chain gangs.

He cut off coffee since it has assault potential (not zero nutritional value as originally stated). When the inmates complained, he told them, '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 that he pipes 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 (116 degrees just set a new record), the Associated Press reports that 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 1 year. 'it's inhumane.'

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who 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, so shut your damned mouths!'

I check stuff like this out before I post it on my site - accuracy counts for a great deal around our house - and my favorite checking site is Snopes. Here's what Snopes says about Joe Arpaio:

Claim: Arizona Sheriff dismissed prisoners' bellyaching about the heat by pointing out that soldiers serving in Iraq cope with similar conditions.

Status: True

Here's the link to the Maricopa County Sheriff's office page.

You rock, Sheriff Joe!!