Chapter One: The Second Toughest Sheriff in America
criminals didn't work and never will."
Sheriff Gerald Hege liked to boast that he ran the toughest - and pinkest -- jail in America. It was definitely the pinkest but maybe only the second toughest. From his sleepy, small town base in Lexington, North Carolina, self-described Barbecue Capital of the World, Hege turned himself into a national TV personality by striving for the unofficial title of meanest, baddest, roughest, toughest sheriff in America. He was also possibly the only one to have his own theme song, "The Man in Black."
Sheriff Hege's not fooling around
Your days of breaking the law are through
When the Man in Black comes after you
(Spoken) That's right. He's got that big stick.
Go 'head and make his day.
He sure loves the smell of handcuffs in the morning."
Hege was narrowly elected sheriff of Davidson County, a mainly rural area located in the middle of the state, in the big national Republican landslide of 1994. He quickly made a mark by painting the inside of the 300-bed county jail bright pink with blue pictures of weeping teddy bears on the walls to make inmates feel like sissies. It was the height of the "get tough on crime" movement sweeping the nation and Hege's testosterone-soaked image perfectly fit the moment. He wore a black, paramilitary-style uniform and was often photographed wielding a five-foot-long stick or a semi-automatic. He designed a new logo for the Sheriff's Department -- a spider's web with a big arachnid in its center -- and he had a giant silver spider painted on the hood of his personal squad car, a souped up, Nascar-style 1995 Chevy Impala with a Corvette engine.
On his Internet site,2 Hege sold a line of posters featuring himself in various threatening attitudes. There was Hege and his men busting a drugs trafficker on the Interstate; Hege standing by his spider car brandishing a semi-automatic while prisoners wearing striped uniforms cleaned up trash; Hege wearing dark glasses holding his stick with three officers similarly dressed arrayed behind him with assault rifles; Hege about to lead a squad of police dressed in full riot gear into action. It was all part of his pledge to make what he called "Hegecountry" a safe and fine place to live for law-abiding citizens and a living hell for 'scumbags'.
The posters had slogans like, "Do the crime, scumbag, and you'll do the time," and "Resistance is futile." There was also a variety of other merchandise for sale on the Internet site: spider web T-shirts, toy spider cars, Hege statuettes and coffee mugs, CDs with the theme song -- even Sheriff Hege's Lexington style barbecue dip. The proceeds went to a police charity.
A county sheriff like Hege is the closest thing America has to a feudal baron. As long as he keeps public confidence and doesn't mess up too badly, there are few constraints on his powers. He has no boss; he reports directly to the voters. Residents of Davidson County liked Hege's style and re-elected him in 1998 by more than 5,000 votes. In 2002, after three of his own trusted deputies were busted by federal agents for dealing in cocaine, marijuana, anabolic steroids and Ecstasy, he still won by around 1,700 votes. All three were convicted and sent to prison.
While cultivating his own macho image, Hege feminized inmates of his jail by making them wear striped uniforms -- baby blue for those charged with misdemeanors, lime green for sex offenders, pastel orange for accused felons and black for the road crew which worked outside the jail. He kept many inmates locked in their cells 23 hours a day. There were no exercise facilities, no television, no cigarettes, no coffee, no pencils or pens and no magazines. Books were censured; only Bibles and other approved texts were allowed. Family visits were limited to 10 minutes a week, with no physical contact between the inmate and his loved ones.
Never mind that many inmates had not been convicted of anything and were in jail awaiting trial because they could not make bail. Never mind that many of those who had been convicted were serving relatively short sentences for misdemeanors. "It's not my responsibility as sheriff to be concerned about whether they are guilty or innocent," Hege said. "Ninety nine percent of the people I have in my jail are guilty of whatever they've been charged with. Very few can be rehabilitated and it's not worth trying."3
Sheriff Hege first came to my attention in 1999 when Court TV gave him his own late night talk show, "Inside Cell Block F," which was filmed live in the jail with inmates as the "guests". The sheriff seemed to personify several different trends in U.S. society all at once. He was a poster boy for the "get tough on crime" crowd, but he was also a relentless self-publicist. And his show, which commanded a regular national audience of around a million, fit the fashion for "reality" TV. "The show is compelling because the inmates' stories are compelling," said Court TV producer Andy Regal. "It's not just reality TV; it's harsh reality TV."
In my role as National Correspondent for Reuters News Service, I was interested in the political and social forces that lay behind the explosive growth of U.S. prisons in the 1980s and 1990s. By the turn of the century, the richest country on the planet also had the world's largest prison population, with more than two million of its citizens held behind bars. How did it happen that the United States, with only five percent of the global population, had a quarter of all the world's prisoners?4 And what was life like for those inside this giant penal system? What was really going on behind the prison walls?
While investigating these issues, I had the opportunity to visit many prisons and jails around the country. I met murderers and rapists, prison wardens and corrections officers, sheriffs and police chiefs, prosecutors and defense attorneys, gang members, doctors, psychologists, child abusers, rape victims, mothers and juveniles behind bars. This book draws heavily on those experiences.
So it was that I found myself in Lexington on a warm spring day interviewing Sheriff Hege, who looked a bit like Darth Vader in a baseball hat. He explained why he had painted the jail pink. "We have a lot of muscle-bound, tattooed guys in here who have done silly things. The pink and the teddy bears brings them down a bit," he said. "I was aiming for a day-care atmosphere - something like a girl's bedroom, a little feminine touch. The color pink has a soothing effect on the inmate population."
Hege would have loved to be called the "toughest sheriff in America" but that was one title that eluded him. There was a lawman out west in Arizona who was even meaner, even rougher, even badder, and even more publicity-conscious. His name was Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and the surrounding area. When it came to media appeal, Arpaio always seemed one step ahead. He was elected in 1992, two years before Hege. He presided over the fourth largest jail system in the country with over 7,500 inmates, which made Davidson County seem strictly bush league. Hege had a pink jail; Arpaio made inmates wear pink underwear and streamed live images of convicts from the jailhouse to the Internet for almost three years until a judge ordered him to stop.5 Hege started a road crew; Arpaio had "the world's first female chain gang" removing graffiti, picking up trash and burying paupers. Hege locked inmates in cells. Arpaio made hundreds of them live in tents under the hot desert sun, fed them only twice a day on green bologna and charged them money for the privilege. "Our meal cost is sixty cents a day for an inmate. Our dogs cost more to feed than the inmates," Arpaio said in one of thousands of interviews he granted.