We’ve received several email comments about the relevance of our last post to juvenile justice reform in Colorado. Admittedly, there is no apparent connection between the last post and this one except that Sheriff Joe is at it again. According to this article, Sheriff Joe Arpaio is proposing to take over juvenile detention for all juvenile inmates in Arizona.

Arpaio is notorious for his ‘tough on crime’ approach, enslaving prisoners for less than 4%  of minimum wage at hard labor and forcing inmates to pay for their own meals with approximately 53% of their daily wage.  While Arpaio claims that his system deters future criminal behavior, StopDirectFile.org has been unable to find any evidence of a reduced recidivism rate that can be tied directly to Maricopa County jail.

StopDirectFile.org has made and supported the claim (see comments) that many American slaves made better livings than prisoners in Arpaio’s jail. If the objective of jail and prisons are rehabilitation, should we really be subjecting children to Arpaio’s slave-labor approach to justice?

Public institutions (namely, Denver Public Schools and the City of Boulder) in Colorado are protesting Arizona’s approach to immigration control through travel restrictions to Arizona. Colorado’s public institutions may soon want to add child inmate and many other human rights abuses to their list of protests against Arizona.