Chain gang weeding in cemetery

Music

Holmes:  It's the only female chain gang in America -- and that makes the Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, a very proud man.

00.20

Super:

JOE ARPAIO

SHERIFF, MARICOPA COUNTY

Arpaio:  I take some heat on it but I also take the credit

Holmes:   Why do you take heat?

Arpaio : Some people don't like it , the civil liberties union, Amnesty International, the Justice Department, but it's been here three years and it'll  be here as long as I'm the sheriff

00.31

Chain gang walk between graves

Holmes:  Sheriff Joe Arpaio, as he never tires of telling you, is elected by the voters of Maricopa County.   And the voters like to see their prisoners in chains.

00.49

MAP:  SHOW SOUTH-WESTERN US, ARIZONA, PHOENIX.

MARICOPA COUNTY

Music

01.00

Coffin out of van

Holmes:  On Thursday mornings, the burials at Maricopa County's public cemetery start early.

01.11

The deceased was an indigent, a scrap of flotsam on the ocean of American prosperity, who died without the money for a funeral.

01.20

The County provides the cheap wooden coffin, and pays the preacher.

01.32

Prisoners listening to prayer

Preacher:  Christine was 44 years old, she was hit by an automobile.

Holmes:  The pall-bearers come free of charge from the County Jail.

01.39

It's a win-win exercise, claims Sheriff Joe.  The county saves money - and the prisoners learn a lesson.

01.42

Arpaio

Arpaio:  We let them know what the cause of death was. Was it a drug overdose, was it alcoholism, are they John Does. If you don't think that's a wake-up call for these people, it is for these people, when they get out I hope they become good citizens

01.50

Arpaio and Holmes walk/get in car

Holmes:  The Sheriff had taken time out of his 14-hour day to be with us at the cemetery.

02.08

He takes time out for every visiting TV crew. 

02.12

He loves to show off his chain-gang  and he loves to show off his new armoured car.

02.18

Exterior car on road

Arpaio:  I don't like to talk about it, but I've received many threats, some are very serious,so I don't like to use my deputy sheriffs for bodyguards of chauffeurs, it takes a lot of taxpayers money, so my staff went out and

02.26

Arpaio in car

bought this car for me, paid by money seized from drug traffickers. It's supposed to take missiles and machine guns and everything else so I think it's a great saving and we'll see what happens, if it works.

02.42

Posse training

02.51

Holmes:  Some of Joe Arpaio's most ardent admirers have joined the Sheriff's posse.

02.55

There are three thousand volunteers in the Maricopa County posse.  None of them are paid a dime, but eight hundred have already completed the training that allows them to carry a gun on duty.

03.02

Tonight, they're being taught how to stop an assailant from getting to the gun before they do - and Frank Adelman, a young 66 as he puts it, is having trouble.

03.15

Holmes:  Frank is an enthusiastic posse man in Sun City West.  It's a retirement community in rural Maricopa County, that doesn't have a full-time police force - and the sheriff's deputies are thinly spread.

03.34

Holmes:  So why do you need the gun?

Frank:  Well to be honest with you my son is an investigator for the state of North Carolina, and when he found out that I put on a uniform and a badge he said "Dad you'd better get yourself a weapon."

03.49

Holmes:  For Frank and his training partner Brook De Walt, Joe Arpaio is a model sheriff.

04.02

Dewalt:  Sheriff Joe Arpaio has a lot of innovative ideas, to say the least, he's always got something going on.

Frank:  Very well put.

04.07

Holmes and Arpaio in tent city

Arpaio:   Right next to the dump over there, the dog pound there and the waste disposal plant.

04.17

Holmes:  Joe Arpaio's tent city was one of his first innovative ideas.

Arpaio:  You've got smells from four different  directions.

Holmes:   A few dozen Korean war vintage tents hold up to twelve hundred convicted prisoners.  They cost the county a hundred thousand dollars six years ago -- a new jail would have cost sixty million.

Holmes:  What do the prisoners think about living here?

04.22

04.29

04.41

I mean, do you get complaints from them?

Arpaio:  Well, yeah.  Would you like living here in 120 degrees in the summer time? But they complain about everything.

Holmes:   The way the Sheriff sees it, the acute discomfort of tent city is just another bonus.

Arpaio:  It's great to save money, but it's also to make it tough. Why should you live better  on the inside than on the outside?

04.54

05.00

 Arpaio

I don't think that's right - when you commit a crime and you're convicted - and they're all convicted in here - you should be punished. And since I'm elected, and I report to nobody except the people that I serve, I can use the word punishment.

Holmes:  Sheriff Joe loves to confront his own prisoners - especially with a camera present - and play the tough guy.

05.21

Arpaio:  It's going get hot in here - you were here in the winter time - now you're gonna see the summer time.

Holmes:  But the fact is, these people are not here for heinous crimes.

05.30

05.35

Prisoners in tent city

Serious offenders go to the state penitentiary.  Only petty criminals, sentenced to less than a year, end up in the sheriff's jails.

Prisoner: I'm in here for driving on a suspended licence.

Arpaio: Oh really?  How much time do you get for that?

Holmes:  They're fine defaulters, traffic offenders, possessors of marijuana.

05.47

Arpaio:  I'm an equal opportunity incarcerator, I don't believe in discrimination, so that's why we got women in the tents.

06.00

Women prisoners

Holmes:  This eighteen-year old slept with a fifteen-year-old boy.  The sentence for having sex with a minor is a year in jail and lifetime probation.

06.09

Arpaio: Wow, lifetime probation?

Girl:   Mandatory for all sex offenders.

Holmes:  Even Joe Arpaio is a bit startled by that one.

06.17

Arpaio:   In this county you get more time for that than you do for killing people it looks like.

06.24

Holmes:  But whatever they're in for, Joe believes that jail should be humiliating for his charges. That's why he introduced the striped uniforms.

Arpaio:  Because I don't like prisoners

06.29

06.37

wearing the same colour uniforms as our professional nurses and doctors, the green scrub, the blue scrub, plus the orange that hard-working people wear. Why should they wear the same colour uniforms? So I went back to the James Cagney and Alcatraz, and now we have striped uniforms.

Holmes:   The inmates of tent city are used to camera crews.

06.56

Holmes and Arpaio walk through tent city

The big American networks have been here, and the cable channels, and the BBC.  So have the Danes and the Germans, the Koreans and the Japanese.  Joe gives the conducted tour to all of them.

07.00

Hamm:  Joe Arpaio is as dangerous to this community as any

07.16

Hamm

Super:

DONNA HAMM

Founder, "Middle Ground"

street thug currently in his jail, and the reason is that he has sort of sold this community on a concept...

Holmes:  Donna Hamm is a former judge, and founder of a pressure group which fights for prisoners' rights in Arizona.

07.31

Hamm:  And that is that prisoners are not people, that they have no connection to the community that they are all in black hats and his people are all in white hats. These are somebody's mother, somebody's brother, somebody's father and somebody's son.

Arpaio

Arpaio:  Well she complains about the prisons too, not just about my jails. Let her complain, she's a nice lady.

Holmes:  Sheriff Joe has been brushing off criticism from human rights groups for years.

07.51

07.56

Arpaio:  Amnesty International came down here, I let them go through the jails, I'm one guy who lets everybody got through the jails. They didn't like it, I told them to go back to Iraq where they came from.

08.01

Handing out meals in Madison street jail

Holmes:  Most complaints re directed, not at tent city or the chain gangs, but at the draconian conditions inside the main County Jail at Madison Street in downtown Phoenix.

08.13

Here thousands of detainees are fed the same cheap meals, wear the same striped uniforms and bright pink boxer-shorts, as the convicted prisoners.

08.25

They too are forbidden girlie magazines, and all but the most educational television.

08.35

Basketball game in prison

They have minimal recreation, no coffee, no cigarettes.  Yet the inmates of Madison Street jail are not convicted criminals, but unconvicted detainees awaiting trial.

08.42

Arpaio

Joe Arpaio has a hard time seeing the difference.

08.57

Arpaio:  But you're treating them as though they were criminals when they're not criminals, yet.

Arpaio:  Well how should I treat them, they are criminals?

Holmes:  They haven't been convicted of any crime.

Arpaio:  Well I think when you take 99 percent, I pretty well will show you that 99 percent -- I apologise for those 1 percent - 1 percent, not even that -- that are not guilty, so am I going to give that 1 percent steak? No, everybody eats the bologni.  I run the jail.

09.06

Manning

Super:

MIKE MANNING

Lawyer

Manning:  He has created a jailhouse culture which is very dangerous, and it's a jailhouse culture that basically says it's okay - says to jailers - it's okay to brutalise these human beings, to beat them, to punish them. In fact in his newsletters he talks about running his jails to be quote "bad jails" and he wants his jails to be places of punishments.

09.28

Manning in office

Holmes:   Mike Manning is no bleeding heart liberal.  He's a leading  Phoenix lawyer with an office at the top end of town. He's just won eight and a half million dollars from the insurers of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, to compensate the family of the late Scott Norberg.

09.54

Photo of Norberg

On June the 1^st, 1996, Norberg was admitted to the Maricopa County jail, accused of resisting arrest.  By noon on June the 2^nd, he was dead.

Nurse:  Do you have any pain, bleeding,

10.11

Admissions hall, Madison street jail

fever, infections, skin problems, lice...

Holmes:  The jail admissions procedure is supposed to weed out the sick and mentally disturbed, and refer them for immediate treatment.

10.27

Scott Norberg was suffering from severe dehydration.  He was delirious, incoherent and barely able to stand. 

10.35

But he received no medical attention.  Instead, he was searched in the normal way and left in a cell overnight.

10.42

The next morning, here at Madison Street, he failed to respond to an officer's instructions.  Without provocation, say fellow prisoners, he was set upon.

10.52

10.58

Manning

Manning:  They beat him for about four or five minutes in tank 6, turned him over, handcuffed him behind his back, so he was face down on the concrete, pulled his arms up behind him and dragged him out face first out into the hallway, where they continued to kick him, in the throat, kicked in his larynx.

11.02

Now there 12 guards beating on this guy, then they bring a restraint chair in.

Restraint chairs in hallway

Holmes:  The restraint chairs can still be seen in the admission hallway at Madison Street,

11.29

Snow shows Holmes chair

and  Sergeant Janet Snow can explain the proper procedure for their use.

Snow:  They're placed in the restraint chair, it's observed by supervisor while the officer restrains the inmate.  Once the inmate is in there they're checked by a nurse to make sure that they're okay.

11.38

Holmes:  That's not how it worked with Scott Norberg.

Manning:  They continued to stun him with an electric stun device,

11.49

11.51

Manning

Super:

MIKE MANNING

Norberg Family's Lawyer

then they put a gag, a towel over his face and nose and mouth and part of his neck, pushed his head forward until he can't breathe, and he dies after eleven or twelve minutes of the most excruciating torture a human being can experience.

Post mortem pictures

Holmes:  Despite the evidence of massive bruising, and multiple electric stun gun marks, the County Medical Examiner declared that Norberg's death accidental.  Sheriff Arpaio still insists that his department's insurers should never have settled the case.

12.15

12.24

Arpaio

Arpaio:  Well, we didn't have to settle, that was the insurance company without my knowledge settled that case.

12.30

Holmes:   So do you deny that any of your officers behaved illegally and brutally in that case?

12.35

Arpaio:  No, they were doing their job, unfortunately the person did die, the coroner, the medical examiner ruled accidental death and we'll see what happens.

12.40

Manning

Manning:   Those guys were exonerated from doing anything wrong. Now that's incredible.

Holmes:   And they're still down there in the jail? 

Manning:  They're still down there, they're still in uniform, they were exonerated.

12.52

Jail doors opening, prisoners coming out

Holmes:  Even before Norberg's death, a Federal Department of Justice inquiry had found a pattern of excessive use of force and negligent medical treatment in Sheriff Arpaio's jails. 

13.06

More than a hundred other former inmates are pursuing civil suits against the Sheriff's Department.  And on the day we were there, this prisoner was released without charge. His arms were still swollen and cut from the way he‘d been handcuffed when Mesa City police arrested him ten days earlier.

13.19

13.29

Prisoner with swollen arm

Holmes:   Did you get to see a doctor while you were in there?

Prisoner:  I just for the first time the other day, took them about a week, four or five days, they finally saw me. They never even told me anything and they gave me some pain killers or something like that and now they're just releasing me, I don't know if it's broken or nothing.

13.36

The FBI is currently investigating alleged violations of the human rights of both prisoners and detention officers. But Joe Arpaio says it's all a conspiracy by his political rivals.

13.51

Arpaio

Arpaio:  I'm not paranoid, but the point is they know I have 80-90 percent approval rating, they know I'll get re-elected like that.

14.03

So by harassing me they're probably hoping maybe we can make it so tough that he'll say to heck with it all, I don't need this, I'm not running gain. But I got news, I am running again, just for spite, because I'm gonna serve the people of this county and no one's going to drive me a way with these phoney allegations.

14.13

Phoenix at night

POLICE RADIO FX

Holmes:  It's true that Sheriff Joe Arpaio seems as popular as ever with Maricopa County voters.

14.38

They don't see the inside of the county jails.  What they do see are hundreds of volunteer posse men like John Kelly helping the Sheriff's deputies fight crime in the mushrooming outer suburbs of the Phoenix conurbation.

14.44

Kelly:  We just try to stay out of their way and help them do their job. If it's like any other night, we'll back up on car stops, we may go to some  fights, burglary calls.

14.59

Kelly at domestic

Holmes:   On the evening we were with John Kelly, there were no dramatic incidents.  Just the usual crop of false alarms and domestic quarrels.

15.10

Kelly:  He's been drinking?  He's not driving, you said.

Woman:  No I wouldn't let him drive it.

15.17

FX:  Helicopter

Holmes:   This was the most exciting thing that happened --  a Sheriff's Department's helicopter helped Mesa City police to capture three Hispanic migrants suspected of pilfering material from a building site.

15.24

Kelly with suspects

Kelly:   We're sorting it out right now, trying to figure out if they were here to take property from here or find out what they were doing here.

15.37

Holmes:  A survey by the Arizona State University has shown that the Sheriff's gimmicks have had no effect at all on whether petty criminals like these re-offend after a stint in his jails.

15.44

What the gimmicks have done is maintain Joe Arpaio's profile as the toughest sheriff in America.

15.57

Manning

Manning:   It's important for him to get elected in this county, that he appear like he's tough on crime, and so he goes out and he appeals to the darkest, to the basest side of our human nature, this anti-crime, which is really an easy way for a person to get votes.

16.03

Arpaio

Arpaio:  I stay at 80-90 percent approval rating for the last six years, I can't get 100 because maybe they won't vote for me, but as long as the people like it I'm elected and I serve the people, and I'll keep doing what I feel is correct.

16.23

Chain gang singing

FX:  Chain gang singing

Holmes:  It's a brave observer, in America, who questions the virtues of democracy. But Sheriff of Maricopa County has proved a simple point: a good way to win over those who do vote, is to play the medieval tyrant over those who don't.

Singing

16.40

16.50