It must be the dry desert air

Gonz

Gonz

molṑn labé
Staff member
My family was in Arizona before it was a state. I was born & raised in Phoenix. Between there & Los Angeles is where I spent all but one year in my pre-adult life.

Winky lives there. Anymore info is for him to divulge.

2 term Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater is a conservative icon. He paved the way for President Reagan.

Maricopa County (Phoenix) Sheriff Joe Arpaio is another in a long line of no-nonsense, western, take charge & don't buy the bullshit kind of guys that makes Arizona proud. How they have that woman ice cream for governor is beyond me. I digress. Sheriff Joe has become a national celebrity for his handling of the Maricopa Country Jail system. If only there were more like him, we'd be a better place.

  • He took away their weights;
  • He 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 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 zero nutritional value. When the inmates complained, he told them.....this is a good one......"This isn't the Ritz/Carlton. If you don't like it, don't come back."
  • He bought Newt Gingrich' 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.

Not bad. Now for the capper

With temperatures being even hotter than usual in Phoenix (116 degrees just set a new record), 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 1 1/2 years. "It's inhumane." Joe 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..... So shut your damned mouths."
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Arpaio’s critics ignore or downplay the good he has done. His drug prevention and treatment program has been a success; a recidivism study found that only eight to ten percent of the 2000 men and women who graduated from it have returned, vastly better than the nation’s 60-70% recidivism rate. He started the only high school in the nation for inmates.
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The figures may have changed on that last piece, it is from 2002

Maybe it's the water.
 
Toughest Sheriff?
Sheriff Joe running on empty
by George Fallar
While we doubt that our Maricopa County Sheriff will ACTUALLY run out of gas (the world's gassiest sheriff), his days may be numbered. Now, we don't mean to impugn Joe's digestive system and accuse him of wind effronteries, we refer instead to his habit of having something to say whenever a camera or microphone is pointed at him. Cave Creek and Carefree have begun the process of firing the Maricopa County Sheriff's department because of ineptitude.

We don't intend to go through a whole mess of crime statistics here, they're both boring and hard to compile. But, one has to think, if the crime rate in Maricopa County was good and/or improving, wouldn't a news beagle like Sheriff Joe be blasting out the news everywhere? Of course! Yet, take a cruise around the MCSO's (Maricopa County Sheriff's Office) own web site (www.mcso.org) and try and find some real stats. Or, you can save some time and take our word for it that there ain't none.

To give the devil his due, law enforcement in Maricopa County is no picnic. With something like 9200 square miles to patrol, there is an awful lot of ground to cover with not a lot of people. And, truthfully, this reporter has dealt with the MCSO deputies a few times and has found them ALL to be complete gentlemen doing a tough job with a great deal of aplomb. The deputies we have met have none of the storm trooper mentality that sometimes creeps into the group psyche of police organizations.

Their boss, however, is a piece of work. While we've rarely, if ever, heard Joe mention 'his' crime statistics, we get ear and eyefuls of everything else. How many other sheriff's have custom painted tanks? Yup, a TANK. Ever wonder how much it costs to maintain a tank? Of course not, why would you unless you were paying for it? Of course we've seen the MCSO helicopters, horses, all the toys. Wow, you've got some cool toys, Joe, most of them large. It's a Freudian nightmare we've got here in our county.

Everybody knows about 'tent city' and the 1000-1500 people housed there. They prisoners there get to wear pink underwear and eat green bologna. All very colorful, but it's interesting to note (okay, let us have ONE sorta statistic) that Maricopa County's recidivism rate is among the worst in the country. So, maybe all the 'tough sheriff' stuff doesn't really work? As of this writing, the latest ploy to get in the national papers with some 'tough sheriff' ink is putting juvenile offenders on the chain gangs. Somebody is sure to object loud enough to catch the attention of Brokaw on the nightly news, thinks Joe.

So, Cave Creek and Carefree have had enough. While Carefree has already hired somebody to monitor their speed trap roads (sure, we know where they are) with a radar gun and write tickets, both towns are now considering putting together a real police force instead of relying on the MCSO to provide protection. Cave Creek fired their 'marshal' (MCSO Deputy Acritelli) a while back and haven't hired another, much to Joe's consternation. Contract services to towns such as Cave Creek form a real part of his budget, and seeing the gas money for his toys dwindle makes his nether regions pucker. Oh well, don't have your deputies caught sleeping on the job then, Joe, and don't charge for 20 grand worth of 'overtime'.

Looking around Joe's web site showed ONE interesting statistic, we have to wonder how old it is. The site says Sheriff Joe has an 85% approval rating! There was a whole lotta speculation a while ago that Joe was going to run for governor. Arizona has a rich history of colorful and/or criminal governors, so a vivid character like Joe would have a good chance of being elected. After all, people seem to re-elect him resoundingly enough that hardly anyone wants to run against him. Yet, Joe declined. Would he have refused to run with an 85% approval rating?
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source (Cave Creek's own website)
 
That is an old story. It gives today's date at the top but it's actually an old story.

Still I'd like to see real statistics.
 
All those leftists websites & all that money spent on lawsuits & the courts have agreed with Sheriff Joe.
 
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