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Harry Anslinger
Joe Arpaio was the notorious, controversial sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County (the Phoenix metropolitan area) from 1993 to 2017. He is well-known for his longstanding pattern of serious police misconduct and his extreme anti-immigration policies. During his research, Hari visits Phoenix’s outdoor tent city jail—which Arpaio, its creator, affectionately calls a “concentration camp.” At tent city, drug prisoners are denied critical medical treatment, served rotten meat, and forced to work on chain gangs in the sweltering desert heat. Marcia Powell also cooked to death in Arpaio’s jail. Hari argues that, rather than deterring prisoners from using drugs, these needlessly cruel conditions only amplify the trauma and isolation that lead people to drug addiction. Hari considers Arpaio one of the modern inheritors of Harry Anslinger’s legacy—in fact, Arpaio developed his approach to law enforcement while working for Anslinger in the 1950s and 1960s.
Joe Arpaio Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Joe Arpaio or refer to Joe Arpaio . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 8
Quotes
Harry Anslinger employed Joe Arpaio in 1957 to be an agent in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and he rose through the bureau over decades. Since 1993, he has been the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. He was eighty when I met him, and about to be elected to his sixth consecutive term. His Stetson, his shining yellow lawmaker’s badge, and his sneer have become national symbols of a particular kind of funhouse-mirror Americana, and his hefty chunk of Arizona, home to nearly four million people, is now Harry Anslinger’s last great laboratory. Sheriff Joe has built a jail that he refers to publicly as his “concentration camp,” and presidential candidates flock here during election campaigns, emerging full of praise. Anslinger said addicts were “lepers” who needed to be “quarantined,” and so Arpaio has built a leper colony for them in the desert.
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“[Marcia] was an addict…Addiction can be overcome with proper help. It ain’t a jail thing.” He believes the solution was to get her into “a mental hospital—that’s probably what would have helped her. Get her whatever she needs—Xanax, morphine, to get her chemical imbalance right…Get her on the right meds. Show her some respect. Give her some working skills. Get her a GED so when she comes out she has a place, like a woman’s shelter, [can] get a job…Give her respect, that’s how it’s supposed to be.” [...] “If you’re calm and cool and know you’ve got a life ahead of you that’s going up the steps…if you know you’re going up in the world, you’re going to stay going up in the world.”
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Joe Arpaio Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Joe Arpaio or refer to Joe Arpaio . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 8
Quotes
Harry Anslinger employed Joe Arpaio in 1957 to be an agent in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and he rose through the bureau over decades. Since 1993, he has been the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. He was eighty when I met him, and about to be elected to his sixth consecutive term. His Stetson, his shining yellow lawmaker’s badge, and his sneer have become national symbols of a particular kind of funhouse-mirror Americana, and his hefty chunk of Arizona, home to nearly four million people, is now Harry Anslinger’s last great laboratory. Sheriff Joe has built a jail that he refers to publicly as his “concentration camp,” and presidential candidates flock here during election campaigns, emerging full of praise. Anslinger said addicts were “lepers” who needed to be “quarantined,” and so Arpaio has built a leper colony for them in the desert.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
“[Marcia] was an addict…Addiction can be overcome with proper help. It ain’t a jail thing.” He believes the solution was to get her into “a mental hospital—that’s probably what would have helped her. Get her whatever she needs—Xanax, morphine, to get her chemical imbalance right…Get her on the right meds. Show her some respect. Give her some working skills. Get her a GED so when she comes out she has a place, like a woman’s shelter, [can] get a job…Give her respect, that’s how it’s supposed to be.” [...] “If you’re calm and cool and know you’ve got a life ahead of you that’s going up the steps…if you know you’re going up in the world, you’re going to stay going up in the world.”
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