Did anyone in there manage to post some good reasons for despising Arpaio? I really want to dislike the guy for being a media whore, but I can’t find any good reasons lately.
Basically he’s a conservative and he takes a hard line approach to crime and the people who commit it. A lot of people on the left hate people who feel punitive toward criminals. This is why we have people in their late twenties and early thirties with rap sheets a mile long running the streets, raping, robbing and killing people when they should already have been in prison for most of the rest of their lives. After all, it’s better that innocent people be subjected to all that than to have three or four men confined to a cell. That’s just downright mean!
Which brings to mind a question I’ve had for some time. If federal judges can impose expensive and unpopular burdens such as forced busing upon state governments and then leave it up to the states to come up with the financing and judge-approved methods of implementation, why can’t they mandate prisons be built in the same way?
And why can’t there be open-air tent-city prisons similar to ol’ Joe’s jail? Surely cyclone fencing and canvas tents are less expensive than the huge monuments to concrete that we’ve been using for so long. At least, you know, until the judges mandate enough prisons to actually keep people behind bars.
I think this goes to the fundamental questions about ideology, both liberal and conservative. Is the ideology alone enough to justify itself or does it have to serve a higher purpose?
Arapaio’s methods may be conservative. But they also cost more and produce less results.
Myself, I don’t care much about ideology. I don’t care if the method is liberal or conservative as long as it works best.
Federal courts can require that a state takes actions to protect the federal rights of those it incarcerates. This happens regularly. If a state is overcrowding its prison system to the extent that such overcrowding violates federal rights, then the federal court system can require that the state either reduces its prison population or builds more prisons.
Similarly, if school segregation violates state citizens federal rights, which it does, federal courts can require that said segregation is ended by the state, regardless of the unpopularity with people such as yourself, and regadless of the fact that you will have to pay extra taxes to fund it, and therefore will ahve less spare cash available to purchase life’s little necessities such as the Stars and Bars, white sheets and material for burning crosses.
Once again, the people in Arpaio’s custody have, by definition, not been convicted of a crime. (It’s a travesty, IMO, that the courts are so backed up that suspects can be locked up for months without a conviction, but that’s another thread.)
We’re also not criticizing him because he isn’t putting his inmates in tastefully decorated suites with flatscreens and Sleep Number beds. It’s about edible food and adequate nutrition.
Arpaio isn’t an asshole because he believes jail shouldn’t be a comfortable place. He’s an asshole because he takes such glee in cruelty. Even if you believe that inmates should be treated like animals (and I don’t), a principled man would regard it as a necessary evil and not something to be proud of. One gets the impression that the only things keeping him from making his inmates survive on one another’s feces and subjecting them to weekly televised ball-tazing are the namby-pamby liberals.
Oh, fuck off, you idiot. I’ve known plenty of black people who strongly disliked busing too. They don’t like having to get their kids up early to go stand in the snow on cold dark mornings waiting to get bused to schools clear across town either. I defy you to come up with one single post of mine on this board that in any reasonable sense racist.
Knee-jerk dipshit!
Sorry Doctor J, but I’ve got to call it a night before the sun gets any higher and I can’t get to sleep. I’ll try to respond tomorrow.
How convenient. Yet again you make an idiotic post, get shown you are wrong, and mysteriously have to disappear, only to forget to answer it later.
I’m not sure who these ‘liberals’ are that you so blithly reference.
My politics are left of lunatic fringe ( as are many of my friends) and none of us want rapists or murderers wandering the streets.
I visited a man on death row in Texas ( no, I didn’t know him. It was something that I did as a Quaker ) and while I didn’t want him executed, I also recognized that he should never be released. He was dangerous.
More to the point though, many of the ‘criminals’ currently incarcerated are behind bars for drug convictions or other non-violent crimes.
Once released, it is extremely difficult for them to obtain gainful employment at a living wage.
I’m not saying that this justifies committing more crimes, but heh, you lack basic skills, you have no money and no one wants to hire you.
What are you going to do to keep a roof over your head and food in your belly?
The gentlemen that currently works for us looked for a steady job for over a year.
He managed to scrap by doing odd jobs but he’ll be the first to admit that he was desperate.
It doesn’t help that, at least here in Texas, prisoners on parole are expected to pay the state monthly as part of the terms of their parole.
Because prisons are being running by private corporations for profit.
It’s a booming enterprise, run, of course, at taxpayer expense.
Which is, of course, why we have nominal interest in actually helping convicted felons find jobs and stay out of prison
Take the T. Don Hutto correction center in Williamson County.
It holds immigrant families.
Some of the families held at the facility are awaiting adjudication of their claims for relief or asylum.
Most are from Mexico or Central America but there are Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Middle Easterners as well.
Like those in Arpaio’s custody, no one there has been convicted of anything yet.
Hutto is run by Corrections Corporation of America.
Until the ACLU and other groups sued the facility, the budget per prisoner per day for food was a little under $2.50.
This included children and pregnant women.
Tell me how you can feed a nutritious breakfast lunch and dinner for under $2.50 per day.
(The lawsuit was settled in 2009 and families are no longer housed there).
Like Starving Artist said: basically he’s a conservative.
Zing!
That’s a paddlin’.
No, this is not true. As sheriff, Arapaio runs the jail, which houses both pre-trial detainees and those convicted of misdemeanor offenses (where the penalty is less than a year confinement).
May we be permitted to some outrage on behalf of those not convicted of any crimes? Just to clarify your position.
If you can’t be fucking bothered to fucking read the fucking cites in the fucking thread you have no fucking right to a fucking opinion. :mad:
Especially YOU!
CMC fnord!
You know what? Back in the good old days people respected the opinions of their elders. Even if they were speaking complete bollocks.
I sure didn’t. But I have grown wiser.
Reading back, it almost looks like I was serious there. Nah…
I have always contended that part of a sentence should be to get some marketable skills, if the person doesn’t have any. Yes, this means that sentences will be longer, in some cases, and indeterminate. But if someone CAN’T make a living other than by stealing or dealing or peddling ass, what better use of his/her time?
I admire your frustration here, crowmanyclouds, but facts and conservatives–especially of the Internet Tough Guy variety–are like oil and water.
Starving Artist and Uzi (and Bricker here too, to a lesser extent) are displaying not only a lack of a grasp of the material facts involved*, but they’re also displaying the sort of juvenile lack of basic human decency and empathy, that characterizes right-wing thinking on issues of crime and punishment.
So it’s not worth getting that angry about.
*Those facts being:
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An insufficiently nutritious diet is NOT synonymous with “torture” or “starvation” (in the way that Uzi tries to disingenuously redefine it), yet it IS a clear violation of civil and basic human rights; and
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The majority of those housed in the Maricopa Jail system have not yet been found guilty of any crime.
And you haven’t proven that the diet is ‘insufficiently nutritious’. You just have a court saying that there was inedible food. Not the same thing at all.
When you wrote that, did it hurt your brain, soul, or both?