Joe Arpaio’s green-bologna methods don’t cut it in family and business life, but part of his mindset may.
Not long ago, I became acquainted with the sheriff who has emblazoned a flash of color into the Frontier West. Arpaio, sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County, learned male jail inmates were selling the boxer shorts they were issued. The annual rip-off clipped taxpayers for $48,000. Sheriff Joe’s solution – dye the shorts a color no self-respecting thug would wear, let alone peddle. The color? Pink!
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Joe Arpaio’s basic premise: “Jail should be punishment, period. You should also never live better in jail than you do on the outside.” So, Joe went to work on making jail a little less user friendly:
*No coffee.
*No porn magazines or R-rated movies. It’s C-Span and Donald Duck.
*Inmates live in tents. (If that’s good enough for U.S. troops in the Middle East, Joe reasons, it’s good enough for lawbreakers.)
*Sometimes the bologna in the sandwiches looks a bit green, but it’s not inedible. Meals cost 30 cents an inmate. “Let me tell you,” Joe says, “the food in jail is as bad as you’d expect, which is exactly as it should be.”
*Some of the jailed work in chain gangs supervised by volunteer posses. (Inmates have to volunteer to be on the gangs.) These inmates do public works, and there are plenty of projects in a city the size of Phoenix.
Sheriff Joe’s approaches have taken a bite out of graffiti, drug dealing, auto theft and gangs in Greater Phoenix. These rough-and-tumble measures have also stirred up controversy. What was behind his campaign? Joe was sick and tired of seeing convicted criminals getting a “free pass” from punishment. Scarce room in jails and a lack of money for detention officers were often the culprit. You can read about Joe’s methods in his book “America’s Toughest Sheriff” (Summit, 1996). Joe was most recently re-elected to office in 2004.
Tough-minded attitudes – of one sort or another – are becoming more popular with community leaders across the country. The lessons extend to business as well as civic life:
*Companies often try to make life seem agreeable even when it’s not justified. I have seen countless firms award bonuses and incentives when performance targets were not met. The justification: extra effort. On rare occasions, that kind of payoff may be justified. Not often. Businesses that reward effort – not performance – may be nose-diving themselves straight into a ditch.
*Is your community strapped to provide public services? If Joe Arpaio could put together a posse of 700 prison volunteers, what could well-organized volunteers in your town do? Could they create new parks and gardens, improve teen literacy or extend the warm meals programs for the elderly and shut-ins?
*Do you use your network to create innovative business deals? Joe sends out trucks with inmates to pick ripe fruits and vegetables. The farmers get “receipts so they can write off what is taken as tax-deductible contributions.” He routes garbage to pig farmers and gets an occasional pig for the food supply in return.
*When you invest in a new building, are you matching the need or building a landmark? Joe recalls: “Nobody thought that instead of spending forty or fifty or two hundred or five hundred million taxpayer dollars on a new jail, let’s try something different. I didn’t invent tents. … Tents were there, waiting to be used. All it took was somebody stopping to think and doing something.”
Your building solution may need to be sturdier than a tent. Even so, there may be smart and innovative ways to cut costs.
During his early career in public service, Theodore Roosevelt served as president of the New York City Police Board. Roosevelt was known for his “Speak softly but carry a big stick” quote. He may have been a believer in soft speaking but not in soft hitting.
“The unforgivable crime is soft hitting,” he also said. “Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.”
People may disagree with Joe Arpaio’s methods, but one thing is true: Punishment is never a deterrent when it doesn’t live up to what it’s supposed to be.
Mackay’s Moral: People pass on crime when the time they do is no picnic.
Harvey Mackay is author of The New York Times best seller “Pushing the Envelope.” He can be reached through his Web site: www.mackay.com; or Mackay Envelope Corp., 2100 Elm St., Minneapolis, MN 55414.
