Inhumanity Has a Price

The assault on New Times began in 2004 when the paper published Sheriff Joe Arpaio's address as part of an investigation into his hidden commercial real estate transactions. Arpaio demanded that the newspaper be prosecuted under an arcane statute that makes it illegal to publish law enforcement officers' addresses in cyberspace, even though that data is readily available on government Web sites and is perfectly legal to publish on newsprint.

Thomas responded by appointing a special prosecutor, who demanded not only the records and e-mails of the paper's writers and editors — but also sought sensitive information on the Internet-viewing habits of our readers. On October 18, New Times published a cover story revealing the invasive subpoenas.

That story violated grand jury secrecy statutes, but the revelations in the article, compounded by the subsequent arrest of Village Voice Media Executive Editor Michael Lacey and CEO Jim Larkin, sparked public outrage. County Attorney Thomas fired the special prosecutor and dropped all charges. He also abandoned the Arpaio-inspired probe of the paper.

As the smoke began to clear, this newspaper began a series, "Target Practice." The project sprang from a fundamental question: Why did law enforcement — the sheriff and the county attorney — believe they could force a newspaper to reveal the identities and habits of the publication's readers?

Our investigation has made one thing clear: Maricopa County's sheriff has a vivid history of ignoring the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He's trampled the rights of prisoners, political enemies, and media critics. In partnership with the county attorney, the pair have expanded their enemies list to include the judiciary and immigrants. Private citizens and their Internet-viewing records were merely the latest victims in a long line.

"Target Practice" seeks to explain how we arrived at this moment.

Like most attorneys, Kathleen Carey leads a busy life. So she didn't take much time to examine what looked like a pimple on her arm. Twelve days later, Carey's arm had ballooned to nearly twice its normal size, and pus was oozing from a boil where the zit had been.

After $180,000 in medical bills, four doctors, and two hospitals, Carey learned that the supposed pimple was actually the flesh-eating "superbug" bacteria commonly known as MRSA staph infection. You may recognize MRSA from recent news reports, following a study concluding that more Americans die each year from antibiotic-resistant MRSA infections than from HIV/AIDS.

MRSA commonly spreads through hospitals, but Carey hadn't been to a hospital or doctor for months before her infection. So where did she get the potentially fatal infection?

Carey says she knows exactly where she got it — the Maricopa County Jail. She wasn't there as an inmate, but as an attorney visiting her client. She was used to inmates complaining about skin infections. Then one day after her visit, Carey noticed the zit. Two weeks later, she was in the hospital with an IV in her arm. Now, more than a year after her hospitalization, she still has a scar from the ordeal.

The damage didn't stop there. Once Carey learned about the deadly and contagious nature of MRSA infections, she paid to have her home professionally cleaned. Everything was sanitized, she was told.

Two months after Carey's battle with MRSA, her 17-year-old son asked to use her computer. Within 48 hours, he contracted the same strain of MRSA. Even with the family's early detection and knowledge about MRSA, he nearly lost his arm to the aggressive flesh-eating bacteria. He now has a two-inch scar where the infection began.

Carey is one of many Maricopa County residents who've never been booked into Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jails but who are paying dearly for conditions inside his lockups.

Vermin, filth, medical care suggestive of POW camps, chronic mismanagement, the wanton destruction of records, and a steady parade of corpses in Maricopa County jails have cost taxpayers an astonishing — and until now, undisclosed — 41.4 million dollars.

Joe Arpaio has perpetuated his reign as "America's toughest sheriff" with an open checkbook.

Your open checkbook.

The Sheriff has captured the imagination of voters with his almost cartoonish contempt for the prisoners in his charge. He's subjected inmates to pink underwear, chain gangs, and rancid bologna sandwiches, and he's garnered big wins at the polls. But Arpaio's jail policies have generated a tsunami of lawsuits from prisoners and their families.

There simply isn't another jail system in America with this history of taxpayer-financed litigation.

New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston, for example, collectively housed more than 61,000 inmates per day last year. From 2004 through November of this year, these same county jails had a combined 43 prison-conditions lawsuits filed against them in federal courts.

In the very same three-year time frame, despite housing a mere 9,200 prisoners per day, Sheriff Arpaio was the target of a staggering 2,150 lawsuits in U.S. District Court and hundreds more in Maricopa County courts.