I believe Maricopa County's Tent City is worse than Guantanamo Bay, Cuba!
You might think about Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or green bologna when you think about the food that is fed to inmates, and you might even support the sheriff's 60 cents a day ration program. After all, what's a little rotted food for a couple of weeks in jail? "Teaches people a lesson," says the sheriff.
You might think of the desert heat when you imagine what its like for the residents living in Tent City jail, after all the sheriff did spend a night in one of the tents himself in May 1995.
Of course, the Arizona Daily Star ran an article titled "Freezes kill apple crop in Wilcox; Loss could range from $2 million to $6 million" that month too. Wilcox, Arizona is located in the desert a couple of hours drive "south" of Phoenix. In the article, David Wilcox, president of the Arizona Apple Growers Association, expressed his frustration about the unseasonably low temperatures in March and in April that destroyed the entire apple crop that year. I don't think the sheriff suffered too much on an unusually tepid May evening looking at the desert stars. After all, spring temperatures in Wilcox had reached a low of 18 degrees Fahrenheit just a few weeks earlier.
Do you realize that many county residents spend 1 or 2 years in the Alcatraz of Arizona?
You might be like I was and think that 10-30 days in hell jail is a good deterrent for petty crimes. But I didn't realize that a lot of people spend a year or two in there. That's right, you'll read about a few who were there for two years, and survived to tell the tale. Sheriff Arpaio didn't put them in there, and he doesn't have the budget to care for them adequately for that long either. I'm going to show you some of these men.
For some people, Maricopa County's jail is a death sentence.
I'll show you two deaths that never made the news. I'll also tell you what one employee (and a several inmates) of the jail told me, people die in that jail all the time and it seldom makes the news.
Surely you know most of the residents in Maricopa County's jail are white people. All of the Latinos, Blacks, and Native Americans together don't outnumber the white people in there.
You may think of torture when you think of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But I'll bet you don't know that Maricopa County's jail has an arguably good sleep deprivation program of its own too.
The most abusive people I encountered in the jail worked there.
When you go to jail, you will have your doctor's prescriptions taken from you. You may, or may not, eventually get an equivalent medication replacement, but your prescription won't be returned.
If you're released to one of the Work-yard programs, a probation officer, not your doctor, decides what medication you are allowed to take and detention officers decide when you can take it.
Not that all the detention officers who work there are errant and abusive, far from it, most go to a day at work and then go home just like you do. The problem with the employees is similar to the problem with the inmates. There is poor supervision, and grouped together, you can't tell the truly bad people from the ordinary people.
I'll show you examples of both kinds of people and you decide if the criminal is wearing stripes or a uniform.
This video is interesting in the sense that it does represent things I saw SRT routinely do. However, some of the SRT remarks I find difficult to believe. For instance, one tattooed woman SRT officer says that prisoners insert razor blades into pencils to use as "shanks". Razors as you might imagine are highly controlled in the jail. They are handed out and collected individually after an hour. Prisoners are locked down when razors are issued and the razors have to be slid under the door for pickup after use. Razors are plastic and it would require complete destruction to get a blade out of it. Not something to go unnoticed. Remember this is jail, not prison. Ninety percent of the prisoners in Maricopa County's jail are not violent, but over one-fourth of the employees are — as you'll see in this video.
What are the most dangerous hazards at the county jail
What was my experience like in Tent City?
Here’s an excerpt from my book:
The van pulled into the entrance to Tent City; the entire compound was ringed with razor wire and video cameras. We exited the cramped confines of the van and were led to a holding cell not much larger than a department store dressing room. I thought that worse was impossible after the Matrix, but I was wrong. The small, cramped holding cell was already filled with prisoners when we arrived. The guards crow barred us inside with the door pressing firmly against the bodies of the prisoners closest to it when it closed. This set a new standard for inhumane treatment by the Sheriff’s Office. On the single bench, long enough to seat three men comfortably, six men sat shoulder to shoulder. The rest of us stood, butt to penis; seventeen prisoners were crammed into one tiny concrete room. The smell of years of body odor and urine in the cell was overwhelming, and the tiny room was hot.
I began to feel claustrophobic. I couldn’t breathe. I was becoming dizzy, so I asked the men around me to catch me if I passed out. A small food tray door in the main door had been left open by the guard. It was our only source of fresh air, and the inmates began shuffling around so I could be near it. At the door, I knelt to breathe through the small opening and get away from the hot stale air. I knelt there for four hours. During that time I realized what was happening to me, the sudden claustrophobia, the difficulty catching my breath, the overwhelming fear — I was having an anxiety attack, a terror I had overcome more than forty years ago had returned.
BAM! The food tray slot in the door slammed shut in my face. The shadow of a guard passed by the door’s glass insert above my head. My peering out of the cell into the open area where the guards were milling about had upset one of them. I closed my eyes and quietly began to pray. I fought to control the feelings of helplessness and panic overtaking me.
It seemed an eternity by the time the holding cell door opened and we filed out to line up against the wall for handcuffs. The lot of us resembling the typical Happy Hour crowd more than a dangerous pack of felons. Our group was led outside the building onto a concrete pad under a large open tarp where laundry bins were filled with clothing stacked in neat piles. We were ordered to strip naked in the frigid air. I stood shivering in the pre-dawn morning of January wearing only my pink rubber bath slippers. The cold wind cut into my skin like microscopic shards of glass tearing at my flesh. My teeth clattered with the loud, rhythmic sound of deer antlers colliding in the mating season.
Two guards dressed in thick winter coats and black beanie hats stood at the end of the line of laundry bins talking and laughing. From their demeanor it appeared they were laughing at us. The humiliation I felt was that of a naked slave at the market. I walked down the line of clothing donning socks, boxer shorts, and another pair of striped pajamas as quickly as the slow-moving line of shivering men permitted. I was issued one sheet, one towel, and six paper thin blankets. (The normal issue in winter, I later learned, was two blankets, but sickness had forced the Sheriff’s Office to allot prisoners four more this year.) The bins that were supposed to contain sets of cotton thermal underwear were empty by the time I got to them. One other prisoner and I stood there, without the much needed protection, waiting to see what would happen next.
“You two guys will have to come back tomorrow afternoon when more clothing arrives from the laundry to request the additional clothing,” the DO said with a shrug, his gloved hands stuffed into the pockets of his heavy, thick coat and a wool beanie pulled down low over his ears to just above his eyebrows. I would need to make due as best I could to survive the night in a cold, arctic air mass blanketing Phoenix that January of 2007. Just two weeks earlier, the temperature had reached a record-breaking low of 14 degrees. Tonight it was 35 degrees and I stood in the night air holding my bedding dressed for the searing heat of summer. I was in trouble — serious trouble.
