Soon you won’t have to get arrested to see the inside of a slammer. A US county jail is installing two video cameras which will show over the Web the hundreds of inmates booked each day… ‘It’ll be educational,’ said Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County Jail. ‘It’ll be a deterrent. Maybe those guys who get busted on Van Buren Street for soliciting prostitutes can wave to their wives.’ The cameras are to follow inmates as they progress through areas of the jail. Perhaps predictably, not everyone thinks this is a good idea. ‘Sheriff Joe often seems to forget that a lot of people in his care haven’t been convicted of a crime,’ said Eleanor Eisenberg, executive director of the Arizona Civil Liberties Union. ‘Putting them on the Internet for all the world to see is an invasion of privacy that is not warranted.’



It could be for the best though. Sheriff Arpaio’s jails have been the subject of investigations into alleged brutality, and recently the Sheriff got on the wrong side of a wrongful death suit following the death of inmate Scott Norberg in a restraint chair in 1996. The affair ended with Norberg’s family settling aagainst Maricopa County for $8 million. ‘I’m getting tired of everybody saying we killed Norberg,’ Arpaio explains. ‘Now everybody can see for themselves.’