Joe
Arpaio Is No Aberration
By Margaret Kimberley
“The carceral system must be torn
out root and branch.”
September 02, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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Even most leftish
white Americans like to think that their country
is good and its institutions are fair and
equitable. According to this wishful thinking
human rights abuses only happen in faraway
places and injustices here are resolved by
reining in a few bad apples. The facts say
otherwise and prove that the United States is
consistently one of the worst human rights
violators in the world. The cruelty of its
prison system extends far beyond headlines of a
few well known villains like
David Clarke
and
Joe Arpaio
.
Donald
Trump’s pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe
Arpaio is quite rightly a big news story.
Trump’s pardon is easily denounced as an obvious
violation of the spirit of the presidential
pardon process. It was a sham used to circumvent
an established process. Arpaio had not even been
sentenced for his misdemeanor contempt of court
conviction. Full pardons are rare in any case,
with examples such as Chelsea Manning’s being
far more common. She received a commutation and
only after serving seven years of her sentence.
Arpaio
is surely deserving of scorn heaped upon him. He
referred to his jails as “concentration camps.”
He held prisoners outdoors in tents, a
violation of national and international law.
Arpaio was convicted of contempt of court
because he continued to detain undocumented
people without charge in violation of a judge’s
order.
“Arpaio
referred to his jails as ‘concentration camps.’”
He used intimidation and charged anyone who
opposed him with crimes and even faked an
assassination attempt which sent an
innocent man
to jail for four years. Not only were female
prisoners shackled while giving birth but he
didn’t bother to investigate hundreds of sexual
assault cases. The judgments against him cost
Maricopa County in Arizona millions of dollars.
But
Arpaio differs from the rest of law enforcement
only in the openness of his methods. Joe Arpaio
was a media whore and relished the attention
given to him by Fox news and other right wing
outlets. He became a fixture among the people
who elected Donald Trump and openly bragged
about his untouchability.
It must be pointed out that the United States is
full of Arpaios in all 50 states. Two judges in
Pennsylvania literally made a fortune sending
juveniles to jail. Women in New York state
prisons are still
shackled while giving birth
,
in direct violation of that state’s law.
No one knows for certain how many people died in
Arpaio’s custody. But there are horrific stories
of death in prison all over the country.
Prisoners have died of thirst, or from treatable
illnesses when denied medication. Some of these
cases are brought to light but thousands of
others go unreported. In the state of Texas
alone,
6,900 prisoners died
in custody over a ten year period.
“The
United States is full of Arpaios in all 50
states.”
Trump
and Arpaio are inviting targets. Both men
dispense with niceties and show the system in
its barbaric glory. There is no attempt to mince
words, beat around bushes or put a happy face on
wrong doing. They are forthright in advocating
their racism while the prison industrial complex
grinds on, destroying lives and sometimes ending
them.
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Arpaio
and Trump show the dangers of allowing open
racism to flourish. The Trump presidency
emboldens white supremacy but in an ironic way
minimizes it too. Mass incarceration is
diminished by attention paid to the Trumps and
Arpaios in this country. Because of the endless
desire to cover up the country’s crimes, the
focus falls on the most blatant evils. All the
while the system goes on committing an unknown
number of human rights abuses in jails and
prisons across the country.
The
system is built to incarcerate for the sake of
incarcerating, and people of color are the
primary victims. Their victimizers may not look
for publicity like Arpaio did, but their actions
as nameless bureaucrats are equally deadly.
“There
are horrific stories of death in prison all over
the country.”
It is a
grave mistake to reserve outrage and protest for
the Trumps and the Arpaios of the world. Doing
so allows the other killers to act with
impunity. That is why the carceral system must
be torn out root and branch. Prison abolition
should be the watch words and mealy mouthed talk
of reform must be dismissed.
The
United States would still have more than 2
million incarcerated persons if Joe Arpaio
didn’t exist or if Donald Trump weren’t
president. It should not be forgotten that a
Democratic president, Bill Clinton, did more to
expand mass incarceration than any other. But
his successors did nothing to end it either.
The
worst criminals are outside of the prison walls.
Some of them are well known like Trump and
Arpaio but most are faceless as they carry out
horrific abuses. The focus of our attention must
be on ending the system that allows them all to
flourish.
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom
Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is
widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a
frequently updated blog as well as at
http://freedomrider.blogspot.com.
Ms. Kimberley lives in New York
City, and can be reached via e-Mail at
Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
