World affairs

Take the merciless heat of the Arizona Desert and a ramshackle camp made of the leftovers of the Korean War. Add the acidic bravado of America’s toughest sheriff and a touch of hard labour. Sprinkle on some humiliating pink underwear and you have Tent City, the most bizarre correctional facility in America.

By Nick Bradshaw

It’s fast becoming another hot and breezeless day in Phoenix, Arizona. Way out on the outskirts of the city, past the all-you-can-eat diners, car dealerships and rows of windowless industrial units, small groups of men sit around, chatting idly.

One man enjoys a mid-morning nap under a canopy that protects him from the sun’s powerful rays. Another is reading a faded, dog-eared paperback. Two men ‘busy’ themselves sweeping nothing in particular. A small distance away, some guys appear to be stealing a lorry very slowly; so slowly, in fact, their actions are hardly perceptible.

The lorry is pretty secure, though. Within view of it are several men and women with guns, and there’s a watchtower and an electric fence capped with barbed wire. Oh, and the men lethargically getting into the vehicle are wearing baggy, black-and-white stripped pyjamas that would make them stand out in most crowds. You know, the type of thing that escaping prisoners wear in cartoons or in Laurel and Hardy films. All in all, it resembles an out-take from O Brother, Where Art Thou?

What these rigorously supervised men are actually doing is loading up the vehicle with equipment that they will later use to dig graves, tend the verges of desert highways, or do something else thoroughly knackering. Whatever their backbreaking task, it will be carried out under armed guard, and they will be chained together at the ankles at all times.

It soon transpires that these are willing volunteers. For them, anything that means getting to spend time beyond the fortified fences of Tent City is considered a treat. Even hard labour.

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Nestling less than 500km from the towering, gaudy opulence of Las Vegas, Tent City is probably the most bizarre jail in America. As the name suggests, inmates are housed not in solid brick buildings but under fabric. The man behind the decision to put masses of inmates in tents in the Arizona Desert is a controversial local character by the name of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

When he was elected Sheriff of Maricopa County – the district that covers Phoenix and the surrounding area – in 1992, Sheriff Joe decided that the conventional, air-conditioned jails within his jurisdiction were simply too good for his inmates. He made it his personal duty to ensure that no voter would ever again be able to complain, as many had done, that the inmates of Maricopa lived in a holiday camp.

If the jail fills up, he simply erects another tent. Subtle it ain’t, but then you get the feeling the sheriff knows that.

Coupled with this was the desire to get large numbers of criminals off the streets and into somewhere cheap as well as miserable. Realising that overcrowding would soon be an issue, Sheriff Joe embarked on a hunt to find somewhere suitably grim for his growing prison population. The answer came in the form of 70 discarded army tents left over from the Korean War.

I’d got in touch with the Sheriff’s office a few weeks earlier to see if I could visit Tent City. “No problem,” I’d been told. What’s more, the sheriff himself would be happy to show me around. And so, on this baking hot day, we travelled together to Tent City from Sheriff Joe’s office in the centre of Phoenix.

Upon arrival, we were met by local news crews who’d been tipped off that the sheriff was making a grand tour and that he would be accompanied by a member of the foreign press who had shown an interest in Maricopa’s controversial methods of incarceration.

The news crews had turned up, not to cover the story of Sheriff Joe’s visit to the prison, but that of how the sheriff and Tent City were of interest to people on the other side of the world. Somehow he’d managed to turn me into the story. Now that’s what I call spin.

And so, with the news cameras watching me as I, in turn, watch the sheriff, the tour begins. “I’m pleased to say that we recently broke our record,” he says to the cameras. “We now have 10,300 people in jail. For years we only had room for five or six thousand. Now, people planning to commit crime know we’ll go after them and, thanks to the tents, we’ll always have room for them in jail.”

With this, he points up to large neon ‘vacancy’ sign perched on one of the watchtowers. If the jail fills up, he simply erects another tent. Subtle it ain’t, but then you get the feeling the sheriff knows that.

Since the complex was built in 1993, more than 350,000 inmates have served time there. “It cost $120,000 to create Tent City,” the sheriff says, as he weaves his way through the metal-framed units, each filled with bunk beds and covered in thick tarpaulin. The lodgings are totally unsuited to desert conditions, but clearly the price was right.

“We put some cement on the ground rather than dirt. And as a particularly nice gesture, I paid for electricity so they could have lights. They have lights, but no air conditioning.” This in an area that boasts some of the highest temperatures in the inhabited world.

The sheriff’s primary role may be law enforcer but he is also a showman – part ringmaster (he’s never happier than when displaying his large collection of docile, caged beasts) and part pantomime villain (he often calls out to ask inmates if they are happy. When they shout back in unison with a resounding “No”, he pauses for effect before growling his reply: “Good!”).

He also relishes the controversy he courts, as it draws attention to his methods; by showing potential inmates what punishment awaits them, he believes, he puts them off committing crime in the first place. With the same philosophy in mind, he allows local kids to spend the weekend in a mocked up Tent City unit, so they can get a taste of how miserable incarceration can be.

Putting inmates into tents turned out to be just the start of Sheriff Joe’s plan to shake things up in the jails under his jurisdiction, a philosophy that has prompted the US media to label him America’s Toughest Sheriff, a badge he wears with pride. Since taking up his post, he’s introduced measures that have led to fame and notoriety in equal measures.