Sheriff Joe’s Jails: An Escape Story

“America’s toughest sheriff” has escaped a fate so poetically just as to make the gods weep. Unlike the inmates in his county jails, he will never peer from the other side of the bars. He will never eat the green bologna sandwiches. He will never be paraded around in chains and striped pajamas or pass a 110 ℉ summer day in his “tent city” “concentration camp.” He will never be subject to the harassment of ill-educated detention officers. He will never wear the threadbare pink underwear warmed by a hundred asses before his.

It’s been my privilege to to get an inside view of Sheriff Joe’s jails. Back in the relatively progressive late nineties, I taught English through a local college program to largely Hispanic inmates at Durango and Towers jails. I remember dodging a puddle on a dank November morning, the nauseating smell of the nearby dog pound greeting me on my first day. I, of course, my freedom but a few hours away, could sweep aside the dismal emotions provoked by that scene.

A Short Escape from the Sheriff’s Clutches

My stint in the Maricopa jails lasted a year. Five mornings a week, I passed through the clanging doors with my hand-outs, took possession of my bundle of stubby bowling-score-card pencils, and held court with my captive audience for four hours. They were an appreciative group, but not because I wowed them with my superior teaching skills. My class was one of their only opportunities to escape the tedium, the institutional squalor, and the hostile provocations of both other inmates and some of the staff. (I once witnessed a detention officer taunting an inmate in a holding cell, the latter clearly crazed and already out of control.) Sadly, the program was discontinued. A waste of taxpayer money.

Some prisoners found escape in other ways. One day, a student presented me with a small gift: a woven necklace of a cross embedded in a heart. Fine and delicate, it had been fashioned from pale pink and white thread. The workmanship amazed me. I should have guessed how my student had managed to get his material, but I had to ask. It was only when he smilingly pulled at the band of his pink underwear that I understood. It seems such weaving was  a kind of folk art practiced by several of the Mexican students in my class. And lacking few other resources—save snack bags or gum wrappers— they picked the thread from their prison garb.

While that job gave me a look inside the jails, it was not my only encounter with Sheriff Joe’s domain. Between 2014 and 2016, my son was a guest in those very jails on several occasions, each visit stemming in one way or another from his addiction to heroin and associated infractions. On each occasion, after detoxing on the filthy floor of the holding cell and later the sick pod, he fell in with the dull routine.

For him escape came in the way of a dog-eared book, a smoke in the yard, a talk with me on the phone—which entirely depended on my being able to pick up before the call went to voice mail. He never got a visit, though. It seemed to involve some labyrinthine procedure through an online application the exact instructions of which I could not understand from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office website. We both knew, however, that even if I did go down to the jail, the visit wouldn’t be in person but over closed circuit video.

Luckily my son did not stay in Tent City. But he did send me the entertaining piece of mail at the top of this post, one of a couple of edifying picture postcards available for purchase. Here’s another one:

Image of postcard of Sheriff Joe with dead camel, a waarning against the sale of tobacco to minors.

My son was also fortunate that his mug shot did not appear on the “playful” “Mugshot of the Day” feature of the MCSO website, a truly awful practice that from 2011 to late 2016 allowed viewers to vote on the most pathetic mugshot of the last 24 hours.

A Sheriff Not Loved by All Arizonans

These are just a few personal reflections on the now discredited sheriff. The Phoenix New Times, among many other news outlets, has documented many of his serious abuses, not the least of which is the racial profiling Arpaio refused to discontinue after being ordered to do so by a federal judge. And let’s get the record straight here. Although Donald Trump may claim, as he did in defense of his recent pardon of Arpaio, that he (the sheriff) “is loved in Arizona,” the estimated 50 percent of us Arizonans who disapproved of the pardon are incensed that he has escaped his day in court.

Once again my inspiration for today’s post is Charli Mill’s Flash Fiction Challenge.

Graphic of tree-lined shore and "August 24: Flash Fiction Challenge"August 17, 2017 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write about an escape artist. It can even be you, the writer, escaping into a different realm or space in imagination. It can be any genre, including BOTS (based on a true story) or fantasy. You can focus on the escape, the twist or the person who is the escape artist.

Escape Artist

Only his hands and eyes existed. And the thin strands. Cross, loop, knot; cross, loop, knot.

He wanted to give her something. The nice gringa teacher. Who looked him in the eye. Who smiled. Who explained in Spanish when he couldn’t understand.

The fat gringo voices around him faded. The rows of bunks. The sweating walls. The smell of urine.

Cross, loop, knot. A cross. A heart. A simple cord necklace.

He fingered his small creation. Thought of his village outside Culiacán. His mother. The smell of tortillas and the simmering pot of frijoles.

He could taste them now.

 

 

Beacon of Hope in Troubled Times

Image of beacon of light from the starry sky
Photo by Nate Bittinger

When will the aliens come to rescue humanity? How will the revolution start? Why don’t those few leaders with a moral compass stand up to speak truth to illegitimate power? Where is that flashing beacon of hope?

The Beacon that is Literature

I see little on the horizon to answer these questions. So, I turn to literature. And having neglected some literary landmarks over the years, I dove into Ursula Le Guin’s 1974 “ambigous utopia,” The Dispossessed. A tale of two worlds cut off from each other by centuries of distrust—the larger planet, Urras, resembling earth with its wars and extreme inequality between rich and poor; and the other, Anarres, a  bleak and impoverished moon settled by utopian anarchists—it is a timely story, indeed.

Told through the philosophical voice of Shevek, a physicist from the moon who endeavors to reunite the worlds, it is impossible not to apply its lessons to the current state of affairs in the world. The riots that took place in Hamburg during the G20 summit this last week (anarchist driven perhaps, but also the expression of ordinary people looking for their own beacon of hope) aptly illustrates the anger and frustration.

Freedom and Responsibility

I’ve only just begun the book, but a passage struck me last night, compelling me to ponder the relationship between “order” and “orders,” between freedom and responsibility. The scene involves an argument the young Shevek has with a friend (Tirin) over the reasons why no one from the moon has visited the mother planet, Urras. “We are forbidden,” Tirin, says. To which Shevek replies:

Forbidden? . . . Who forbids? . . . Order is not ‘orders.’ We don’t leave Anarres because we are Anarres. Being Tirin, you can’t leave Tirin’s skin. You might like to try being somebody else to see what it’s like, but you can’t. But are you kept from it by force? What force? What laws, government, police? None. Simply our own being, our nature as Odonians, responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it would be to lose our freedom. Would you really like to live in a society where you have no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?

Certainly the book strikes a chord with me now. I still suffer a deep distress and pervasive melancholy over the election results of last year. And the ongoing assaults to our collective sanity and well-being from the current administration only amplify those feelings. Like others, I threatened (however hollowly) to move to Canada once the “Orange Menace” took office. But echoing Shevek above, I am America. I might like to see what it is like to be Canadian, but I can’t, really. The laws of either country notwithstanding, America is the skin I wear, no matter how deplorable I find nationalism.

Our Responsibility to Others is Our Freedom

Sadly, as Samuel Johnson said in 1775, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” My deeper distress comes not from the fact that such an unabashed scoundrel operates in the world, but that so many of my fellow Americans voted for him.  Sure, his followers saw him as the law-and-order candidate. The candidate who would protect our freedoms. But “order” in this case comes down to “orders.” And what a slew of executive orders we have seen. I don’t believe those “patriots” most given to “bullhorning” our freedom—those for example, who flaunt giant flags on their pickup trucks—take freedom to be the same thing I do…or patriotism for that matter.

Not that they don’t make a connection between freedom and responsibility. Not that we don’t have to fight for our freedom godammit. But what that brand of American seems to care about most is the infringement of their particular freedoms: to own assault weapons; to remove regulations that interfere with their own financial gain; to use the excuse of “religious freedom” to deny services to groups of “others”; to secure their own piece of the pie even if it means others get none. It’s a freedom enforced by law, not one defined by our responsibility to each other.

Freedom or the Totalitarian State?

These themes are nothing new of course. In thinking about all this, I pulled from the shelf Erich Fromm’s psychoanalytical classic Escape From Freedom. From the back cover of my husband’s 1967 Avon edition:

If man cannot live with freedom, he will probably turn fascist. . . Using the fundamentals of psychoanalysis as probing agents, Dr. Fromm reveals the illness of contemporary civilization as seen by its willingness to submit to totalitarian rule. While the rise of democracy set certain men free in a political sense, it has simultaneously given birth to a society in which the individual feels isolated, dehumanized, and alienated. This situation has frequently resulted in blind devotion to a Leader, abject submission to an all-powerful State, and barbarous politics of aggression and mass murder.

Is this where we are in the United States at this moment? On the brink of fascism? Or have I overindulged in “fake news” put out by the “false media”? Considering that de-legitimization and restraint of the press is a common tool of despots, (witness the now closed White House press conferences), I don’t think I am overreacting.

So, I look for a beacon of hope. While our would-be fuhrer tweets his messianic diatribes to the angry dispossessed, I throw my lot in with the thinkers: with the writers and artists and filmmakers and educators who keep the intellectual flame alive. At least we are not burning books…yet.

As for beacons, thanks to Charli Mills and Carrot Ranch for Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge July 6provoking these thoughts with her prompt of beacon for this week’s flash fiction challenge.

Beacon

I search the night sky. As if the answer were there. As if science fiction were true and benevolent aliens could save us. Why bother? I see nothing. The stars are snuffed out.

Here below flames rip at cars and barricades and shop fronts—bonfires of fury and pain. The undercurrent of violence deafens me, pulls me down on streets wet from water cannons. My hands bleed from the bricks I have thrown.

You pull my arm. You scream. The maelstrom snatches your words and eats them.

But I follow at last—you—a brighter beacon than the flames.