Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, looked disappointed. Al Sharpton was supposed to come to Arizona to lead a march demanding Arpaio’s resignation. But Sharpton had other plans. “He’s going to Alabama this weekend instead,” Arpaio told Lisa Allen, his media-relations director. They were riding in the back of the Sheriff’s car, a big black Chrysler with tinted windows. “He’ll never come,” the Sheriff said bleakly. “Alabama—isn’t that where Bull Connor was, that they’re always comparing me of?” Two silent, extra-large deputies rode in the front seat. Arpaio, who is seventy-seven, thick-bodied, and restless, studied the strip malls and waste grounds streaming past. He wore a gray suit, no badge, a tie clip in the shape of a pistol. “But Shaq is coming tonight?” he asked. Allen thought he was. The occasion was the première of the film “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” at a mall in Tempe, where Arpaio looked forward to walking the red carpet with Shaquille O’Neal.

Arpaio and inmates at the Tent City jail. Photograph by Dan Winters

Arpaio is known as “America’s Toughest Sheriff.” He even wrote (or caused to have written) a book with that title, as well as a second one, published last year, “Joe’s Law: America’s Toughest Sheriff Takes On Illegal Immigration, Drugs, and Everything Else That Threatens America.” When he’s not taking on everything that threatens America, Arpaio pursues his passion for being in the vicinity of celebrities. He made a point of visiting Charles Barkley when Barkley was in his jail on a D.U.I. earlier this year. After it was reported that the Los Angeles County jail was having trouble with overcrowding, he offered to put Paris Hilton into his lockup after her D.U.I. (No luck.)

Tempe had been awarded the “Wolverine” première in an online vote. A modest outdoor stage had been thrown together, under a billboard for Hastings & Hastings, discount accident lawyers, and the mall parking lot was mobbed. “Where’s the red carpet?” Arpaio asked. It turned out to be a long, dirty, maroon rug. The crowd, craning to catch a glimpse of Hugh Jackman, seemed to be mainly teen-agers. A sunburned middle-aged couple approached Arpaio and asked for a photograph with him. He obliged—this was more like it.

The first celebrity arrived, a big guy in heavy stage makeup, with well-muscled arms and long blond hair and extremely white teeth. He bared his teeth and flexed his biceps, mugging for the cameras. I asked a gangly teen-ager in a tuxedo who he was. Clearly astounded by my ignorance, the teen-ager said, “That’s Sabretooth, from ‘American Gladiator’!” The actor, Hollywood Yates, later told me that his character on “American Gladiator” was, in fact, Wolf.

People who were actually in “Wolverine”—Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Will.i.am—started arriving, each bounding onto the little stage to raucous applause.

Shaquille O’Neal never showed.

I asked Hollywood Yates what he thought of Arpaio.

“He’s awesome!”

Yates’s wife, Shari, who had joined us, grimaced. She was slim, blond, in her late thirties. She wore much less makeup than her husband. “Joe is too hard-core for me,” she said.

“Well, I love it,” Yates said. “Those people are in jail for a reason.”

Maricopa County is not a modest, out-of-the-way place. It includes Phoenix, covers more than nine thousand square miles, and has a population of nearly four million. Joe Arpaio has been sheriff there since 1993. He has four thousand employees, three thousand volunteer posse members, and an overworked media-relations unit of five. Like most sheriffs in America, he is elected. He is currently enjoying his fifth four-year term, and looking forward to winning a sixth in 2012. Maricopa sheriff’s races are, in the age of Arpaio, not lighthearted affairs. Stephen Lemons, a political reporter for the weekly Phoenix New Times, told me with some chagrin that Barack Obama’s victory in November was actually overshadowed, in his mind, by Arpaio’s reëlection.

Arpaio always wanted to be a cop. His parents were immigrants from Naples. “They came through Ellis Island legally,” he says. His mother died giving birth to him in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father owned grocery stores there, and Joe was raised mostly by friends and relatives. After a hitch in the Army, he became a patrolman in Washington, D.C.—“Black neighborhood,” he told me. He later worked as a federal narcotics agent in Turkey and Mexico and, finally, Arizona, where he retired. He and his wife, Ava, who have two children, ran a small travel agency in a suburb north of Phoenix. Then, in the early nineties, Joe decided to run for sheriff against an incumbent weakened by scandal. In Maricopa County, where the population has more than quadrupled since 1970, it is not always a disadvantage to lack local roots. Arpaio wasn’t eloquent, but he spoke in short, quotable bursts, and he pummelled opponents with gusto. He promised to crack down on crime and to serve only one term. He won the Republican primary, which is traditionally all one needs in Maricopa.

The biggest part of the sheriff’s job is running the jails, and Arpaio saw that there was political gold to be spun there. The voters had declined to finance new jail construction, and so, in 1993, Arpaio, vowing that no troublemakers would be released on his watch because of overcrowding, procured a consignment of Army-surplus tents and had them set up, surrounded by barbed wire, in an industrial area in southwest Phoenix. “I put them up next to the dump, the dog pound, the waste-disposal plant,” he told me. Phoenix is an open-air blast furnace for much of the year. Temperatures inside the tents hit a hundred and thirty-five degrees. Still, the tents were a hit with the public, or at least with the conservative majority that voted. Arpaio put up more tents, until Tent City jail held twenty-five hundred inmates, and he stuck a neon “VACANCY” sign on a tall guard tower. It was visible for miles.

His popularity grew. What could he do next? Arpaio ordered small, heavily publicized deprivations. He banned cigarettes from his jails. Skin magazines. Movies. Coffee. Hot lunches. Salt and pepper—Arpaio estimated that he saved taxpayers thirty thousand dollars a year by removing salt and pepper. Meals were cut to two a day, and Arpaio got the cost down, he says, to thirty cents per meal. “It costs more to feed the dogs than it does the inmates,” he told me. Jail, Arpaio likes to say, is not a spa—it’s punishment. He wants inmates whose keenest wish is never to get locked up again. He limits their television, he told me, to the Weather Channel, C-SPAN, and, just to aggravate their hunger, the Food Network. For a while, he showed them Newt Gingrich speeches. “They hated him,” he said cheerfully. Why the Weather Channel, a British reporter once asked. “So these morons will know how hot it’s going to be while they are working on my chain gangs.”

Arpaio wasn’t kidding about chain gangs. Foreign television reporters couldn’t get enough footage of his inmates shuffling through the desert. New ideas for the humiliation of people in custody—whom the Sheriff calls, with persuasive disgust, “criminals,” although most are actually awaiting trial, not convicted of any crime—kept occurring to him. He put his inmates in black-and-white striped uniforms. The shock value of these retro prisoner outfits was powerful and complex. There was comedy, nostalgia, dehumanization, even a whiff of something annihilationist. He created female chain gangs, “the first in the history of the world,” and, eventually, juvenile chain gangs. The chain gangs’ tasks include burying the indigent at the county cemetery, but mainly they serve as spectacles in Arpaio’s theatre of cruelty. “I put them out there on the main streets,” he told me. “So everybody sees them out there cleaning up trash, and parents say to their kids, ‘Look, that’s where you’re going if you’re not good.’ ” The law-and-order public loved it, and the Sheriff’s fame spread. Rush Limbaugh praised him, and blurbed his book. Phil Donahue berated him.

Arpaio’s one-term campaign promise had to be shelved. Opinion polls found that Sheriff Joe, as he was called, was the most popular politician in Arizona. The Democrats didn’t even bother running a candidate against him in 1996. In fact, he often says, the governorship has long been his for the taking. But he likes being sheriff—he pronounces it “shurf.” He got a tank from the Army, had the howitzer muzzle painted with flames, and “Sheriff Arpaio’s War on Drugs” emblazoned on the sides, and rode in it, with Ava, in the Fiesta Bowl Parade. He decreed that all of his inmates—there are now roughly ten thousand of them, double the number when he took office—must wear pink underwear. And pink socks and pink flip-flops. Even pink handcuffs. Pink, he explains, mock-sincerely, is a soothing color.

“I know just how far I can go,” Arpaio told me. “That’s the thing.”

His deputies, particularly his jail guards, seem to have less sense of how far they can go. Thousands of lawsuits and legal claims alleging abuse have been filed against Arpaio’s department by inmates—or, in the case of deaths in detention, by their families. A federal investigation found that deputies had used stun guns on prisoners already strapped into a “restraint chair.” The family of one man who died after being forced into the restraint chair was awarded more than six million dollars as the result of a suit filed in federal court. The family of another man killed in the restraint chair got $8.25 million in a pre-trial settlement. (This deal was reached after the discovery of a surveillance video that showed fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating the prisoner, and after the sheriff’s office was accused of discarding evidence, including the crushed larynx of the deceased.) To date, lawsuits brought against Arpaio’s office have cost Maricopa County taxpayers forty-three million dollars, according to some estimates. But the Sheriff has never acknowledged any wrongdoing in his jails, never apologized to victims or their families. In fact, many of the officers involved have been promoted.

Other jails get sued, of course. The Phoenix New Times found that, between 2004 and 2008, the county jails of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston, which together house more than six times as many inmates as Maricopa, were sued a total of forty-three times. During the same period, Arpaio’s department was sued over jail conditions almost twenty-two hundred times in federal district court. Last year, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care withdrew the health accreditation of Maricopa County’s jails for failing to meet its standards, and a federal judge refused to lift a long-standing consent decree on the jails, finding that conditions remained unconstitutional for pre-trial detainees. (The consent decree mandates that the jails be monitored. But it hasn’t had much effect.)

Remarkably, Arpaio has paid almost no political price for running jails that are so patently dangerous and inadvertently expensive. Indeed, until recently there were few local or state politicians willing to criticize him publicly. Those who have, including members of the county board of supervisors, which controls his budget, tend to find themselves under investigation by the sheriff’s office. Local journalists who perturb Arpaio have also been targeted. The Phoenix New Times ran an investigation of Arpaio’s real-estate dealings that included Arpaio’s home address, which he argued was possibly a violation of state law. When the paper revealed that it had received an impossibly broad subpoena, demanding, among other things, the Internet records of all visitors to its Web site in the previous two and a half years, sheriff’s deputies staged late-night raids on the homes of Michael Lacey and James Larkin, executives of Village Voice Media, which owns the New Times. The deputies arrested both men for, they said, violating grand-jury secrecy. (The county attorney declined to prosecute, and it turned out that the subpoenas were issued unlawfully.)

Outspoken citizens also take their chances. Last December, remarks critical of Arpaio were offered during the public-comment period at a board of supervisors meeting, and four members of the audience were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct—for clapping. Their cases are pending.

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Some local politicians have begun to speak up. Phil Gordon, the mayor of Phoenix, publicly denounced Arpaio last year for abuses of power. Gordon told me in his office recently that the Sheriff has imposed “a reign of terror” on Maricopa County. But the Mayor was referring neither to the jails nor to the intimidation of critics. He was mainly talking about a wide-ranging campaign, carried out by Arpaio in recent years, against undocumented immigrants in Maricopa County.

Arizona is a major corridor for Latin Americans sneaking into the United States, and the Phoenix area is both a stopover and a destination. Roughly half a million undocumented immigrants live in the state. Arizona is also full of retirees from the Midwest and the Northeast—Sun City is in Maricopa County—and these elderly Americans are, by and large, not completely delighted to find themselves among folk, mostly poor and brown, who don’t speak English. The state is home to an array of nativist groups, and its legislature has passed perhaps the harshest anti-immigrant laws in the country. Arpaio, always a discerning student of conservative voter sentiment, surveyed all this a few years back and decided to transform his sheriff’s department, with a crucial assist from the Bush Administration’s Department of Homeland Security, into a sort of freelance immigration-enforcement agency.

His deputies conduct extensive raids in Latino towns and neighborhoods. They say they have investigated and arrested more than thirty thousand undocumented aliens. This campaign has landed Arpaio on Lou Dobbs’s show, on CNN, where he is treated as a conquering hero, and has drawn support from ultra-right and racist groups, including neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. It has also brought Arpaio critical attention from civil-rights organizations.

In March, the U.S. Department of Justice, at the request of members of Congress, launched an investigation into charges of discriminatory conduct by the sheriff’s office in Maricopa County. “It’s garbage,” Arpaio says—grandstanding by politically correct bureaucrats afraid to enforce the laws, Obama Democrats throwing their weight around. Certainly, it has not slowed the pace of his roundups. “Since I got my letter March 12th, we’ve locked up another hundred fifty,” he told me in April. In the world according to Sheriff Joe, almost every problem in America these days can somehow be traced back to “illegals.”

That was presumably why Arpaio seemed so excited to hear the early news about swine flu: it was coming from Mexico. “We gotta get something out!” he said. He meant a press release. The Sheriff gathered eight or nine aides around a big table in his office. “Illegal Immigration Breeds Crime, Disease,” Arpaio suggested. “Can we get masks for the deputies at the tents? ICE”—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—“has masks, don’t they? We should close the border.”

The press-release team included Lisa Allen and other members of the media-relations unit; a jail administrator; a public-health specialist; and two deputies from the Sheriff’s human-smuggling unit, who had brought with them a map of Mexico. “Ninety, ninety-five per cent of the people we apprehend are from Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chiapas,” one of the deputies said, spreading out the map. “The south.” He and his partner were the odd men out at the meeting. Everyone else was in business attire; the deputies wore bluejeans and black T-shirts and carried pistols on their hips. Both deeply tanned, with sunglasses pushed up on crewcuts, they were also the only Latinos present. People silently studied the map. Finally, Lisa Allen said, “Mexico City is where?”

Arpaio was getting impatient. Len Sherman, who co-wrote both of the Sheriff’s books, said firmly, “The story here is that Homeland Security is doing nothing about this, just like New Orleans. So we’re taking action.”

The public-health specialist said gently, “Surgical masks do nothing to combat this virus.”

Arpaio erupted. “This is my press release! I’m the sheriff! I have some knowledge! I’m not just some little old sheriff!” He told a complicated story about a Nixon-era anti-narcotics program called Operation Intercept, which he said he ran with G. Gordon Liddy, and which nearly closed the border with Mexico for ten days in 1969.