Out of uniform and sitting at his wide desk on the 19th floor of the Wells Fargo Bank building in downtown Phoenix, Sheriff Joe Arpaio could be another successful chief executive. Except he has just got another death threat.

He has lost count of how many that makes. More than 40, he thinks. But he doesn't carry a gun and he has no bodyguards. "If they're going to get you, they're going to get you."

"They" could be any of the thousands of criminals who have gone through his notorious jail system, where the inmates wear convict suits with broad stripes and pink underwear, live in leaky tents, may have done a stint on a chain-gang and are fed green bologna.

Since he was elected sheriff of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its sprawling suburbs of over two million people, in 1992, Arpaio has made headlines, which he thrives on, while holding a cynical view of the media and their methods.

He shrugs when his critics accuse him of being a publicity hound. It's the media who seek him out, not the other way around, he points out.

He is just an irresistible figure, especially for foreign TV teams who portray him as a re-incarnation of a ruthless Wild West lawman who has his own posse of volunteer deputies to clean up the streets of Phoenix.

Thanks to his penny-pinching economies at Tent City, the sheriff is also seen as "mean" when he deprives his prisoners of coffee and hot lunches to save the Phoenix taxpayers millions of dollars.

He also bans cigarettes, unrestricted television viewing and pornographic magazines such as Playboy although he has been interviewed by Penthouse. He used to let the prisoners see children's films but stopped that when at a showing of Old Yeller, the prisoners cheered when the dog died.

The sheriff also introduced bedtime reading and used to play tapes of Newt Gingrich's civics lectures over the loudspeakers. This sounds like mental torture but Gingrich is no longer in favour and now the sheriff appears on video screens, sitting in front of a fireplace, to introduce audio books for the prisoners who have to listen.

Most prisoners prefer to be in the tents than in the adjoining jail building where four inmates are crammed into cells made for two and locked up for 23 hours. The tents are the sheriff's way of dealing with over-crowding while saving money, but they must be an ordeal when the temperature hits 120 degrees fahrenheit on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, beside a smelly rubbish dump.

The deprivation of creature comforts is deliberate. The sheriff wants his temporary guests to hate his jail so much that they will never come back.

He says: "Criminals hate this place. They also hate the sheriff who put them there. I expect them to hate me, that's par for the course, but I tend to think they hate me a little more."

Talking to some of the male and female prisoners, which I was allowed to do freely, there seemed to be irritation and even contempt for Arpaio's methods rather than hate. As Karen Halsell, who is in for possession of drugs puts it: "I'm 46 years old and I'm here because I'm stupid. At 13, I was on the street . . . Joe Arpaio is like a flea we have to deal with." At the same time, she is "grateful" for some of the rehabilitation programmes Arpaio has set up, such as the health classes which are "really helpful". Behind the tough sheriff exterior, Arpaio is in fact nobody's fool. His "executive resume" fills four pages. Before becoming sheriff, he had 28 years of law enforcement experience which included being a policeman on the beat in Washington and Las Vegas. But for most of that time he was working in dangerous undercover situations as a federal anti-drugs agent which included stints in Turkey in the 1960s and Mexico in the 1970s. A film is going to be made by Robert Mitchum's son about this part of his career.

Arpaio retired in 1982 and settled in Arizona, where his wife has her own business, but 10 years later he decided to run for sheriff for Maricopa County, the fourth largest sheriff's office in the US. He was re-elected in 1996 unopposed and is running again later this year.

Whatever the prisoners might think, Arpaio is popular in Phoenix and he is being mentioned as a future governor of Arizona although, at 68, he says he is not interested. "I'm going to keep fighting for the people that I serve. I don't report to anybody. This is the greatest job I've ever had." He is especially proud of setting up the only accredited high school in US jail for juveniles awaiting trial. His "Alpha" anti-drugs programme has a high success rate in rehabilitating addicts in jail, he claims. Women prisoners value the "Dignity" programme as a deterrent to prostitution.

Some of the prisoners told me they actually like the much maligned "green bologna". Louis Perry says it is: "one of the better of the meals. We rate the stuff by the colour in here. We sometimes get stuff called `red death'."

Pink underwear became the rule to try and stop the smuggling of the standard white shorts to family and friends outside. But the pink became hugely popular as a gimmick when the media wrote about it and is now being sold commercially, signed by the sheriff.

The chain gang is not as brutal as it sounds. Only prisoners who volunteer go out to clean streets in Phoenix while chained together. Going on the gang for 30 days is a way of getting back lost privileges and the right to do the jobs in and outside the jail - hence its name, "Last Chance programme". Chad Beezley says: "jail is uncomfortable. I hope that I don't come back. For a lot of people it takes something like this to wake up and figure out what they're doing isn't the way to go. Then you change your life and that's what I plan on doing."

He adds: "I don't like Sheriff Joe Arpaio because he's more about himself and public relations than he is about anything else."

The sheriff does not worry about his prisoners' poor opinion of him. He is happiest when they never come back - although some do. They prefer the tents to being homeless in Phoenix.

The sheriff leafs through a thick list of all the foreign media which has made the trip to Phoenix to interview him and is puzzled when there is no reference to Ireland. "Hey, you're the first Irish newspaper. What took you eight years?"

Better late than never Sheriff Joe.