further losing your freedom is enough punnishment, the absurd veiw that the jail is there to punish is wrong. The purpose of jails is to sequester safely out of the way those that would harm us.
from the link above
In fact, it lays out a damning pattern of abuses in Maricopa County's jails.
Its author, George Sullivan, an Oregon corrections consultant, found that an unwise abundance of stun guns, pepper spray, restraint chairs and the practice of hog-tying, combined with Arpaio's macho rhetoric about getting tough on inmates--70 percent of whom await trial under an assumption of innocence--has led to an environment where Arpaio's employees have made "unprovoked, unnecessary and, consequently, unjustified and excessive" use of force.
and even worse
Richard Post spent only a few hours in Madison Street Jail, but in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's penal colony, no stay is too short to avoid abuse.
Especially for inmates like Post, who make demands on their captors. For those kinds of troublemakers, Arpaio's jailers reserve a special form of treatment.
Call it the Madison Street Special: Jailers stuff unruly inmates into a medieval-looking restraint chair and--federal investigators have found--heap abuse on their immobilized wards.
Injuries and even a death have resulted from the use of the restraint chair, but Arpaio continues to defend its use for locking down trouble inmates.
Inmates such as Richard Post.
After all, Post, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, had pounded on his cell door demanding that a jail nurse give him a catheter so he could urinate.
For Arpaio's jailers, it was an easy call: Post needed "chairing."
So they crammed him into the device and left him in it for six hours.
They ignored his pleas that such treatment of a paraplegic would cause serious injuries. In fact, the lower, paralyzed portions of his body were severely damaged, and Post would spend four months in bed, convalescing.
But Post's protestations fell on deaf ears. Jailers intended to teach Post a lesson he would never forget. So they strapped him down roughly into the metal contraption, and tightened its leather straps with all their might.
And broke Post's neck.
And now, almost a year after his stay in Joe Arpaio's jail, Post has lost much of the use of his arms, and faces surgery to remove a vertebra from his neck.
It's a tough penalty meted out by a tough sheriff, but then that's the avowed mission of a lawman who brags that his jails are meant to be so miserable no inmate will ever break the law again.
And that includes evildoers such as Richard Post, who has spent a total of one night in jail in his life.
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