The complete indictment of Joe Arpaio

Like most of you, I’ve read the appalling history of Joe Arpaio’s reign of terror over Maricopa County, Arizona.

But I hadn’t seen the whole story.

Thanks to Harper’s Weekly Review, bracketed by two appropriate Trump references, is the full monster fascist known as Joe Arpaio–much, much worse than anything I’d heard. Occasionally I’ll say “brace yourselves”, usually half kidding. This time, no joke:

Days before the Mexican government offered to send aid for the victims of a Category 4 hurricane that made landfall in eastern Texas and caused catastrophic flooding in up to 50 counties and drove an estimated 30,000 people from their homes, one-time pornographic-film extra and current U.S. president Donald Trump issued a pardon for Joe Arpaio, a former sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County who, during his 24-year tenure, held inmates in Korean War tents that reached temperatures of 141 degrees; referred to those tents as a “concentration camp” and the place “where all the Mexicans are”; called complaints from Latinos “civil rights crap”; said it costs more to “feed the dogs than it does the inmates,” whom he fed rotten green bologna; ran on his office’s website a “Mugshot of the Day” contest inviting visitors to vote for their favorite inmate images; shot footage of female inmates that could be viewed online; forced hundreds of inmates not yet convicted of any crime to march from one jail to another in pink underwear; oversaw guards who referred to Latino inmates as “wetbacks” and “Mexican bitches,” strapped to a chair a paraplegic inmate and then tightened the restraints until his neck broke, and forced a female inmate to give birth in shackles; said he was the “first in the world” to put women in a “chain gang”; admitted that his counsel had hired a private agent to investigate the wife of a judge who ordered him to stop racially profiling Latinos, a ruling he was later found in contempt of court for ignoring; claimed that all people crossing the Mexican border had swine flu; said he was “doing something good” because the Latino community was “leaving town”; asked a Latino waitress if it was “safe” to drink a glass of iced tea she had given him; was found to have inadequately investigated or ignored hundreds of sex crimes; opened a rape investigation into a political opponent and investigated for child molestation a former Phoenix mayor who disagreed with his treatment of Latinos; oversaw deputies who threatened to arrest a reporter for viewing public records and forced a man’s dog back into a burning house that they had set on fire; ran a jail with four times the suicide rate of county jails for Chicago or Miami; banned his inmates from drinking coffee and possessing pornographic magazines, and created an in-house radio station that broadcasted songs by Frank Sinatra; referred to his Italian-American bodyguards as his “mafia”; and chained together teenage inmates and forced them to bury the corpses of poor people. “More rain coming,” tweeted Trump.

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