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

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 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.