I am writing in response to the Oct. 2 article “Florida executes convicted killer of exotic dancer.” Since I started working, I’ve always wondered where my tax dollars went. According to the Florida Department of Corrections, Florida is the nation’s third-largest state prison system with a budget of $2.4 billion and just over 100,000 inmates. Meanwhile, the Maricopa Arizona Country Sheriff, Joe Arpaio has methods that are assumingly the reasons as to why he gets elected multiple times.
If more people would follow the effective methods of Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona it would be a less of a burden for taxpayers and not like a “country club” atmosphere with weights, multiple cable channels, free meals and air conditioning in prisons.
Arpaio uses methods such as the CodePINK (where he has the inmates wearing hot pink jumpsuits), the “Tent City Jail” (where prisoners have to sleep just like our military troops), cut off coffee, no weights, no pornographic magazines, and also charges inmates for food as an incentive to work and only has two cable TV channels such as The Disney Channel and The Weather Channel.
Arpaio states, “So they will know how hot it’s gonna be while they are working on my chain gangs.”
Arpaio also stated, “Chain gangs are where inmates could do free work on county and city projects, thereby lowering the taxes and helping raise the standard of living on the local population.”
It makes me believe that if we would use the same ideas there wouldn’t be recidivism and our tax dollars would go to more important criteria such as education and health. Arizona has the lowest national rate of recidivism, at 24.5 percent. I recommend that all states take a look at what Sheriff Arpaio is doing in his state and implement his concepts and ideas.