Joe Arpaio Tent Prison is not a Club Med for inmates

Tent Prison is not a Club Med for inmates

Minister of Justice of Canada and Quebec We are tired to pay for Club Med Jail, please contact the sheriff below.

Location:
2939 W. Durango Street
Phoenix, AZ 85009
Phone: (602) 876-5551

No Club Med here!

The Tents Jail was begun in 1993 when Sheriff Joe Arpaio was able to obtain some surplus military tents. These tents were set up in an area adjacent to one of the existing Maricopa County Jails in Phoenix, Arizona. Sheriff Arpaio had previously decided that he would not release any inmates due to jail overcrowding, and housing sentenced inmates in the tents seemed a good solution. Funding for the project was minimal, and included the cost for cement necessary for base pads, secure fencing, and electric costs for heating, cooling and lights.

The Tents Jail can currently hold up to 2,126 inmates.

Sheriff Arpaio has added a few improvements at the Tents Jail, including four Sky Watch Towers for security, stun fences around the perimeter, and facial recognition computer software for inmate identification. K-9 units and patrol deputies have been added for additional security. The Classification Unit conducts background checks on inmates before they are housed in the tents, so that dangerous or predatory individuals are not placed there.

Scheduling tours: Group tours of the internationally famous Tents Jail can be scheduled in advance by calling: (602) 876-5551. Adults only (ages 18 and over. Please provide full names and dates of birth when calling to schedule the tour)

Tours will be conducted by Tents jail staff

Group size: up to 5 adults, no tour buses

Time and date availability to be determined by Tents Jail Administration

Dress standards apply. (Business casual is appropriate.)

Other guidelines/requirements may be established by Tents Jail Administration.

Groups wishing to purchase Sheriffs’ related items at Enforcement Support please contact (602) 876-1000 ask for a transfer to Enforcement Support to get prior approval.

Please see the "Frequently Asked Questions" (FAQ) pages for more information about visitation hours/rules, regulation and rules about inmate mail, and other questions related to the Tents Jail.

Inmates in Arizona’s Maricopa County jail system already have it harder than most other prisoners. By decree of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, they are only given two meals a day, which they must pay for out of pocket. All inmates, even the mentally ill, are made to wear pink underwear, sometimes by force (the subject of recent litigation). And those residing in Tent City prison, a self-described “concentration camp,” must brave summer temperatures as high as 117 degrees.

Now these same prisoners –totalling roughly 8,000 in number — must suffer one further hardship: they will no longer be able to eat meat.

According to Arpaio, who calls himself “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” it’s a cost saving measure. In a recent appearance on Fox 10, a local Phoenix affiliate, the Sheriff explained that “little by little,” he’s taking his prison system vegetarian. “There will be no more meat on the menu,” said Arapaio, “we’ll save $100,000.”

Instead, Yahoo News reports, the jail will replace meat with protein-rich soy. Arapaio defended his decision to Fox 10, donning a chef’s hat and endorsing one soy and vegetable dish.  “It looks great. It looks like stew,” declared Arpaio. “I’m getting hungry.” However, the affiliate’s reporter wasn’t sold, pointing out that many of the carrots in the “stew” were brown, and the soy looked like “wood chips.”

“Oh, that’s probably just dirt,” replied Arpaio. “Don’t worry about that.”

Unfortunately for Arpaio, who has been sheriff for 21 years, many are worrying about the way in which he manages his prisons. The 81-year-old has been condemned by Amnesty International and the ACLU for his poor treatment of inmates. According to the Phoenix New Times, Arpaio’s is the first American county prison system that Amnesty has received enough complaints about to investigate.

The courts have also taken issue with the Sheriff’s tactics. In 2008, a district judge found that Arpaio’s jails failed to meet constitutional standards in multiple key areas, summarized by AZCentral as “quality of food, inmate access to recreation areas, temperatures in which inmates taking psychiatric medication are held, and the quality and availability of medical and mental-health care.” In 2010, the same judge found that there remained “significant areas of failure to comply,” and noted that the only improvements made were those that posed no additional cost.

Ironically, despite Arpaio’s obsession with saving money, his policies have left taxpayers on the hook for millions of dollars in court fees and settlements. From 1998-2010, the county paid out $13 million to inmates and their relatives for injury and death claims against Correctional Health Services.

In addition to legal fees, the Sheriff’s harsh methods have attracted a large number of critics in the media. In 2008, The New York Times Editorial Board called Arpaio “America’s Worst Sheriff,” and criticized the lawman for “a long and well-documented trail of inmate abuses, unjustified arrests, racial profiling, brutal and inept policing and wasteful spending.”

And for his detractors, it’s Arpaio who’s the real criminal. “Sheriff Arpaio is armed and dangerous,” said the Times. “He is a genuine public menace.”

Serving time in prison is not supposed to be pleasant. Nor, however, is it supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money.

While there's plenty of blame to go around, and while not all of the facilities described in this series have all of the problems we explore, some stand out as particularly bad actors. We've compiled this subjective list of America's 10 worst lockups (plus a handful of dishonorable mentions) based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with criminal-justice reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy.

We will be rolling out profiles of all of the contenders in the coming days, complete with photos and video. Our third contender you're probably already familiar with, thanks to a proudly defiant boss who takes pride in humiliating his heavily Latino jail population, and pinching pennies at the expense of their humane treatment.
 

Tent City Jail (Phoenix)

Number of prisoners: 2,000 more or less

Who's in charge: Joe Arpaio, warden and sheriff of Maricopa County

The basics: No jail is more closely associated with its jailer than Tent City, the 20-year-old brainchild of Maricopa County's infamous tough-guy sheriff Joe Arpaio. In 1993, to save the county the cost of building a new jail, Arpaio set up hundreds of Army surplus tents from the Korean War era and used them to house prisoners. Tent City residents now number more than 2,000, most of them awaiting trial. (See this county press release (PDF) for an event celebrating its 20th year.) The tents are unheated in winter and uncooled in summer—temperatures inside them have been clocked as high as 145 degrees. A few permanent buildings suffice for showers and meals, and a guard tower displays a permanent "vacancy" sign, warning passersby to stay in line. Arpaio himself has called the place a "concentration camp," while Tent City's prisoners have gone so far as to cobble together a survival guide.

To humiliate his charges, Arpaio dresses them in old-school chain-gang stripes, and forces male prisoners to don pink underpants—a detail that has scored him some points among locals. "I can get elected on pink underwear," the 80-year-old sheriff has said. "I've done it five times." By day, men, women, and even some teens are sent out to work on chain gangs, sustained by twice-daily meals that are the cheapest among the nation's lockups. (Arpaio brags that he saved taxpayers $20,000 by eliminating salt and pepper.) Back at camp they risk beatings by gangbangers and guards, and medical care so abysmal that it has been ruled unconstitutional by a federal court.  

The backlash: In a 2011 report, the Justice Department report found "a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos" in the jails run by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, based on the frequent use of racial slurs and punishments for prisoners who fail to speak English.  The federal lawsuit that followed is just one of the many legal actions against Arpaio, accusing him of corruption and incompetence as well as racial profiling. So far, he has pretty much dodged all bullets, and in November was reelected to his sixth term.

Watch: Arpaio refers to Tent City as a concentration camp.

http://www.mcso.org/JailInformation/TentCity.aspx

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/09/27/americas-toughest-sheriff-takes-meat-off-jail-menu/

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/10-worst-prisons-america-joe-arpaio-tent-city