I didn’t set out to write about sheriffs. I was working on a history of a 1933 murder that began with the beating, robbery, and death of a white shopkeeper in the tiny town of Pompano in Broward County, Florida, and ended with the 1940 United States Supreme Court decision known as Chambers v. Florida. That decision, which ex-Klansman turned Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black read over the radio on Lincoln’s birthday, determined that confessions extracted through the use of terror were inadmissible. It was one of the building blocks that led to the Miranda rules and to legal limits on what law enforcement officers can do to a suspect.
It was clear that Broward’s long-serving sheriff, Walter R. Clark, had his fingerprints all over the Chambers case. Clark took charge of the search for the murderer, authorized warrantless searches of Black farmworkers’ homes, supervised the violent interrogation of two dozen Black men and one boy, and the weeklong torture of four men who, just a month later, were sentenced to death based on their forced confessions. The sheriff also operated the jail where those violent interrogations took place, maintained the whites-only jury rolls, and barred Black people from the courtroom except as defendants or witnesses. As a letter of complaint to the governor put it, “A colored man’s life isn’t worth a plug nickel in Broward County, under the dictator-ship of Sheriff Walter Clark.”[1]
Clark was simultaneously the owner of illegal slot machines and a bolita racket (a sort of illegal lottery) and he was in business with some of the nation’s most famous criminals. And yet Clark was also an elected official, a politically powerful politician, and the source of patronage dollars that flowed into Broward County from the state and the nation’s capitals.
An elected county official for most of 1933 to 1950, Clark was removed from office by two different governors for failing to enforce anti-gambling laws: the first time, the vote of one state legislator returned him to power; the second time he died soon after his removal. Clark seemed invulnerable to criticism until a long-running federal investigation into his role in illegal gambling put him in the limelight. His racist policing, which the FBI also investigated, got far less attention.
All of this was confusing to me because I knew nothing about sheriffs outside of Andy Griffith, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Bart in Blazing Saddles, and the terrifying, sunglass-wearing “J. W.” in the movie Cool Hand Luke. I grew up in Canada, not the United States, and while there are sheriffs there, they perform routine tasks like transporting prisoners, serving court orders, and enforcing traffic rules. I don’t think I had ever seen a sheriff before moving to the United States.
Expecting to write a paragraph or two about the role of sheriffs in American life, I started with a literature search. I found biographies of individual sheriffs in the West, a few articles on Early American sheriffs, many works of southern history that mention sheriffs (rarely in a flattering light), lots of publications on medieval English sheriffs, and several fascinating recent investigations into modern-day American sheriffs, but not one study that addressed my basic questions: why are U.S. sheriffs elected? What do they do that police don’t? Why are there so many tales of sheriffs gone wild—committing acts of violence, using their offices for personal gain, undermining civil rights and labor struggles, and even bootlegging and drug-running? Why did U.S. sheriffs seem as powerful as medieval sheriffs when throughout the rest of the formerly British world sheriffs had their powers much reduced centuries ago? How common were misbehaving sheriffs and were they more prevalent in the South as the historical literature and Hollywood seem to suggest?
Finding out about Sheriff Clark was not easy. Clark’s official records were missing (there was literally a blank space in his section of the shelves holding sheriffs’ records in the now defunct Broward Historical Commission Archive), but I also had no luck finding a coroner’s report or even a police report in the Chambers case. The FBI investigated Clark for several years, but, unfortunately, the National Archives had sealed many of those records. I had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to get them, which I was told would take as long as seven and a half years. Luckily, Jay Driskell, an old friend and professional researcher, helped me reduce that wait to two and a half years (although the pandemic added more than a year to that). The papers of various Florida governors contained many letters complaining about Clark, but the papers of the State Attorneys General were nowhere to be found.
In the end, I found enough records—the FBI files, newspapers, governors’ correspondence, federal investigations into policing, and secondary sources—to paint a picture of Clark’s controversial career as a politician, jailer, enforcer of white supremacy, procurer of labor, owner of illegal slot machines and a bolita racket, and operator of the county jail, a place just as dangerous as the dungeons that medieval sheriffs maintained. More importantly, perhaps, I found that, although Clark was infamous, he wasn’t unusual. There have been sheriffs like him nationwide and there still are.
The first thing that struck me is how similar American sheriffs were to their medieval counterparts. Medieval sheriffs’ job was to keep order in a way that secured the crown’s power, which allowed them to secure their own power through force and profit from their positions. They had extensive job descriptions, which were almost identical to those of modern American sheriffs. Medieval sheriffs didn’t deal with traffic accidents or run elections, but they administered punishments, operated jails (or dungeons), collected taxes, took the census, served as coroners, delivered subpoenas, and kept the peace, much like American sheriffs. Sheriffs crossed the Atlantic with the British in the seventeenth century and continued to function in much the same way, although Early American sheriffs were appointed by governors who were themselves appointed by the crown.
Figuring out why the history of American sheriffs diverged from the norm took a lot of reading and some guesswork. Sheriffs in Britain and most of the British Empire became less important as other sorts of officials—justices of the peace, magistrates, coroners, census takers, etc.—chipped away at their various powers and duties. Today, U.K. sheriffs might cut a ribbon at a ceremony or welcome a foreign dignitary but that’s about it. In contrast, American sheriffs kept their long job descriptions, perhaps because the United States was so big and so much of it was rural. Sheriffs were the “government” in many counties. More importantly, beginning in the 1820s, state legislatures began to amend their constitutions to make sheriffs’ positions elected, presumably because during the Panic of 1819 and the economic crisis that followed, sheriffs would have been the ones who confiscated debtors’ property, evicted them from their homes, and threw them in debtors’ prisons. Meanwhile, the governments of rapidly expanding cities created police forces, whose job descriptions focused on law enforcement, and who could be hired and fired at will. Sheriffs still performed law enforcement, but mostly in suburbs and rural areas.
If the plan was to make sheriffs more accountable by electing them, it backfired big time. Sheriffs became more powerful, not less, especially in rural areas. Unlike the men of means who served as sheriffs in the colonial period, elected sheriffs could have more humble origins (Clark’s family was poor). So, in that sense, the position became more democratic, but like other politicians, elected sheriffs tended to protect those who could vote and police those who couldn’t. So, in slave states they were on the side of enslavers; in industrial conflicts they tended to be on the side of capital. Unlike other politicians, however, sheriffs controlled the voting rolls and ran elections, which meant the less ethical among them could ensure electoral victories, including their own. Like their medieval predecessors, they operated with little to no oversight because they generated their own income through the fines and fees they earned by doing various tasks, like delivering subpoenas or carrying out executions. Mayors and city commissioners rarely had any sway over sheriffs. Governors could remove them from office for “malfeasance” or “non-feasance,” but legislators, whose loyalty could be purchased, could return them to office, as could voters.
The southern story, not surprisingly, is a little different. David Blackmon suggests in Slavery by Another Name that antebellum southern sheriffs were not very powerful because they basically did the bidding of the enslavers who dominated political life.[2] They fetched and returned runaways and carried out the most severe punishments suffered by enslaved people, but otherwise they served as government functionaries. It was in the aftermath of slavery that they gained enormous power. Once plantation owners were barred from meting out justice (or more correctly, injustice) against freedpeople, sheriffs filled the vacuum. They also enriched themselves by becoming procurers of Black labor for the convict lease system.
So, the brutal southern sheriff in Cool Hand Luke was not at all far from the truth. I found evidence of similarly corrupt, violent, and powerful sheriffs all over the United States. Sheriffs Lee Baca of Los Angeles County, who ran the largest sheriff’s department in the country, and Mike Carona of Orange County are both convicted felons. Alex Villanueva, Los Angeles County’s second to last sheriff and the first to unseat an incumbent in over one hundred years, ran for office as a reformer but removed civilian oversight of the sheriff’s office. Joe Arpaio, sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, for twenty-four years brought back the chain gang, housed inmates in tents in 145-degree weather, and humiliated them by forcing them to wear pink underwear.
Chattel slavery is now gone, convict labor is still with us, but sheriffs are going strong. Only four states impose term limits on sheriffs, which, according to Michael Zoorob’s research, has created an incumbency advantage that “far exceeds that of other local offices and even members of Congress.”[3] Incumbent sheriffs run 73 percent of the time and win about 90 percent of the time, he says. They are now salaried, but sheriffs still generate income through fees and fines, and increasingly by charging prisoners in county jails for everything from toilet paper to rent. The combination of longevity in office and lack of oversight can be toxic. As Harry Lee, sheriff of Jefferson Parish in Louisiana for nearly twenty-nine years, put it in 2006, he was the closest thing to a king in the United States: “I have no unions, I don’t have civil service, I hire and fire at will. I don’t have to go to council and propose a budget. I approve the budget. I’m the head of the law-enforcement district, and the law-enforcement district only has one vote, which is me.”[4]
Surely, there are many honest sheriffs, and sheriffs’ departments perform important and sometimes heroic tasks. They are often the first responders at car crashes, and they perform search and rescues of all kinds. And, yet the malfeasance never let up. And even sheriffs who are not doing anything illegal can still profit from their office. Jail phone calls and food services are sources of enormous revenue, from which sheriffs can take a generous cut.
Broward County, where sheriff Clark reigned, is now the third-largest sheriff’s department in the country. There have been twelve sheriffs since Clark. Of those, one was suspended twice for malfeasance, one went to prison, two left under a cloud of suspicion, and one was investigated for “massive fraud,” secret accounts, and for (wait for it) paying an employee $13,000 to create a clipping file about him.
Sheriffs are still politically powerful in many places and, according to the Marshall Project, they tend to be more conservative than Americans as a whole. Recently, hundreds of sheriffs, calling themselves “constitutional sheriffs,” have been asserting that they are the final arbiters of what is constitutional.[5]
No matter what our politics are, my detour into the peculiar world of sheriffs suggests we need to pay attention to what our local sheriffs do, vote in local elections, and choose our sheriffs wisely.
Cindy Hahamovitch is the B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Georgia. A historian of international and U.S. labor migration, she is the author of The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945 (UNC Press, 1997) and the triple prize-winning, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton University Press). A Fulbright Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the John E. Sawyer Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and an elected member of the Society of American Historians, she is working on the history of human trafficking in labor over the past two centuries and a history of race, policing, and criminal injustice in South Florida. She is the past president of LAWCHA and of the Southern Labor Studies Association. For twelve years she served as Reviews Editor for Labor: Studies in the Working-Class History. She is now producing very short films on the history of Athens, Georgia, for 11th grade classrooms.
[1]“A law abiding citizen,” May 21, 1944, file folder 13, box 11, series 406, RG 102 (State Archives of Florida, Tallahassee).
[2] Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2009), 61–62.
[3] Michael Zoorob, “There’s (Rarely) a New Sheriff in Town: The Incumbency Advantage for County Sheriffs,” Nov. 12, 2019, pp. 1–2, 5, 13–14. Available at SSRN, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3485700.
[4] Harry Lee is quoted in John Burnett, “Larger-Than-Life Sheriff Rules Louisiana Parish,” NPR, Nov. 28, 2006.
[5] Emily M. Ferris and Mirya R. Holman, “All Politics Is Local? County Sheriffs and Localized Policies of Immigration Enforcement,” Political Research Quarterly, 70 (March 2017), 142–54, esp. 143–44; Maurice Chammah, “We Surveyed U.S. Sheriffs. See Their Views on Power, Race, and Immigration,” The Marshall Project, Oct. 18, 2022, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/10/18/we-surveyed-u-s-sheriffs-see-their-views-on-power-race-and-immigration; Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti, “When Those Behind a Badge Question the Vote,” New York Times, July 25, 2022, A1 and A14; Maurice Chammah, “The Rise of Anti-Lockdown Sheriffs,” The Marshall Project, May 18, 2020, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/05/18/the-rise-of-the-anti-lockdown-sheriffs; “Constitutional Sheriffs,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/constitutional-sheriffs.
