The criminal legal system can often seem monolithic in its trends toward repression and social control. Yet attending to the breadth of institutions comprising the legal system, their specific structure and purpose, is necessary to understanding what the system does and how.

Take the police. Much of the focus in our conversations of police violence has understandably concentrated on the urban police department. It is, after all, where the most visceral forms of policing occur: The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Mike Brown, and so many others; the suppression of campus pro-Palestine protests; “fare enforcement” on public transit; and the sweep of homeless encampments are some of the many ways in which the metropolitan police department enters public recognition.

Hidden in plain sight, the county sheriff gives us another gloss on the violence that is American policing. Unlike the local police chief, the county sheriff is an elected politician. Yet that appearance of democratic legitimacy shields what is in fact a deeply partisan, even authoritarian, office. Sheriffs are the law enforcement agency tasked with carrying out evictions. And they have been the most visible exponents of Trumpism, not only in the particular obsessions (targeting immigrants and trans people, questioning the legitimacy of elections when Democrats win, opposing public health measures under COVID), but also in its broad-strokes rejection of the administrative state itself.

Jessica Pishko, a freelance journalist and lawyer, has been covering sheriffs since 2016. Her bracing new book, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, is the fullest look yet at the unique danger sheriffs pose. I spoke with her recently about researching sheriffs, their connections to the far right, and why sheriffs should be abolished.

Dan Berger (DB): I’d love to hear how you came to write about sheriffs.

Jessica Pishko (JP): When I started doing journalism, I was doing most of my work around the topic of mass incarceration. I was living in California, and I became really interested in county jails because I realized that county jails were getting quite a number of people who would normally have been going to state prisons. Because of a Supreme Court case that required the state to reduce its prison overcrowding (Brown v. Plata), California’s new policy, called “realignment,” shifted a large number of people from prison to county jails. All of those county jails are run by elected sheriffs, politicians without any specific expertise not directly accountable to county leadership. Many of those sheriffs financially benefitted from state funding, money that did not translate into services for the people now in their jails. Jails became more dangerous and overcrowded.

I was interested in the fact that a ballooning and deadly part of the mass incarceration apparatus was run by politicians. In every state, the county jail serves as an important inflection point for those who are arrested and entering the criminal legal system. About 85 percent of all jails are runs by sheriffs who have unfettered discretion in the type of services (or lack thereof) they provide. Sheriffs determine whether or not incarcerated people can see their children and families, how solitary confinement is used, and what kind of medical care incarcerated people are allowed to access. So, for example, if an incarcerated person needs reproductive health care, the sheriff decides how and what that looks like.

DB: Your book makes clear that sheriffs have always been problematic, but your focus is on the last two decades or so of this constitutional sheriff movement. Can you say a bit more about what this movement is and how it relates to a longer history of sheriffs in the US?

JP: In part, my argument is that there isn’t all that much that is new. But the current state of sheriff politics is complicated by the politics of the current moment and Trumpism in particular. The far-right “constitutional sheriff” movement is in large part born out of other far-right movements, especially militia and “patriot” movements, that were germinating in the late 20th century and that culminated in the 1995 bombing at Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh. All of these far-right adherents, including McVeigh himself, saw the county sheriff as the only legitimate law enforcement. This idea of sheriff supremacy traces back to a movement called “Posse Comitatus,” which took root in mostly rural regions in the 1960s and ’70s. While these groups were prone to violence, they all saw the sheriff as their friend, even if this relationship was not reciprocated.

In the book, Richard Mack’s career offers a way to chart this history. Mack was a two-term sheriff in rural Arizona who was recruited by the National Rifle Association to become a plaintiff in what became a Supreme Court case challenging parts of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. (The case is captioned Printz v. United States, named after a Montana sheriff.) He runs the largest national organization that represented the constitutional sheriff movement, which is a far-right movement that argues county sheriffs are the ultimate arbiters of the constitution—above the president, the Supreme Court, and the legislature.

Before this, Mack had tried to run for multiple offices, he was on a reality TV show, he tried to become a sheriff in Utah, and he even tried to start a constitutional county in Arizona—much to the dismay of the people living in that county, who did not sympathize with his goal. None of his efforts took until Barack Obama became president. Beginning around 2010 or 2011, we have the Tea Party Movement and Ron Paul running in the Republican primary. All of a sudden, the constitutional sheriff movement, alongside other right-wing militia groups like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, get some salience. They are able to capture the same sentiments that would become the modern-day MAGA movement. Trumpism has now made the constitutional sheriff movement a legitimate piece of the contemporary right-wing policy program.

Mack also had the fortune of having Sheriff Joe Arpaio, an Arizona sheriff who is probably the most infamous sheriff that people know in the United States, join his organization. (Arpaio was a rabidly anti-immigrant sheriff in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, and was investigated by the Department of Justice for racial profiling. In 2017, he was convicted for contempt of court because he refused to stop racial profiling Latinos.) And when Trump controversially pardoned Arpaio, he also implicitly expressed his support for this constitutional sheriff movement. Trump’s pardon gave the right-wing sheriff movement a certain degree of legitimacy.

DB: You say in the book that the sheriff is a job creator, a jailer, and above all a politician. But what is so interesting in following your reporting is that more than anything the sheriff seems like an aggregator of right-wing bigotries and conspiracies.

You talk about the moral and material panic about the border, about trans people, about vaccines, about “voter fraud.” You talk about all the right-wing money and influence that is lined up behind the sheriffs. We have seen the “thin blue line” and the right-wing romanticization of the police, but there is something a little bit different or at least more specific going on with sheriffs as these kinds of promulgators of American authoritarianism. Could you unpack that a little bit?

JP: You’re right that sheriffs become this vector for both extremism as well as conspiracy theories, as well as valorization of the police broadly. By any metric, sheriffs are more right wing than police, at least police chiefs. Sheriffs as a whole are more likely to be white men, more likely to hold very conservative politics and to promote the thin-blue valorization of the police. But within the current strain of Trumpism, which many sheriffs ascribe to, we also see a distrust of law enforcement, especially a deep distrust of federal law enforcement, and a distrust of the administrative state. Because of that, the sheriff has become a more idealized form of law enforcement, because sheriffs are populist by nature: They are elected, they do both criminal and civil law, and they don’t answer to other officials in the county. This gives the impression that their job reflects the will of the people, that their role is to enshrine citizens’ right to things like firearm ownership. The sheriff is a person who metes out something like justice, not law.

Sheriffs have always supported civilian firearm ownership to a much greater degree than police have, for example, or at least more so than police chiefs, who generally do not want armed civilians. Sheriff associations have written briefs arguing that it is unfair for civilians not to be able to own exactly the same firearms that police own. So it’s sheriffs who are arguing that it is not fair for civilians to be limited in their ability to own firearms. That is a really unusual position for someone whose job is law enforcement, right? Because normally you would say, Oh, well, law enforcement wants to prevent people from getting the most dangerous firearms because we don’t know what they will do. Yet sheriffs are perfectly willing to support civilian firearm ownership.

The other issue is simply geography. About 80 percent of counties voted for Trump in 2020; those 80 percent of counties only represent about 20 percent of the population. (In 2024, the number of counties voting for Trump went up.) Yet, each of those counties has a sheriff. So there are many more sheriffs who are in Trump-supporting counties, even though those sheriffs do not represent the majority of people in the county because most people live in urban areas. This suggests that sheriffs represent land, much like the electoral college. Sheriffs are elected by county borders, so they really represent land, not people. It is not as if there is one sheriff per however many people. There is one sheriff per county, whether that county has 250 people or millions. And so in that way they disproportionately represent rural areas, especially at the state level. Because you can get a large number of sheriffs together to present something that looks like a united front of sheriffs, even though they may represent, let’s say, less than the majority of the population. Sheriffs make it appear that a lot of people oppose gun regulations when the majority of people actually support such policies.

DB: I was surprised that so many sheriffs talked with you at all these sheriff events that you went to. Was it because they were public figures that they were interested in talking with you, even though once you started publishing pieces they could see that you were critical of them?

JP: Yes, because sheriffs are elected, they are a lot more prone to talk in general. But also there is an entire right-wing media ecosystem, including TV and podcasts and Facebook Live, where these sheriffs are able to talk and tout their views. Unlike police chiefs and other appointed agents, sheriffs run for office, most of them on partisan platforms. Many sheriffs actually benefit from stories in mainstream media that paint them as MAGA or very conservative. So in some ways the interviews were helpful, but not necessary to glean their views. It is very different than if you are trying to talk to someone like a police chief. Because police chiefs are appointed by the mayor or city council, they are chiefly concerned with pleasing their bosses and have almost no incentive to talk to journalists. And you wouldn’t see police chiefs doing podcasts or blogs in the same way that sheriffs do. It is simply not in their interest to say much.

DB: Are there any movements to reign in the power of sheriffs, akin to movements to defund the police?

JP: There are electoral and legislative movements to limit the power of the sheriffs, and there are also more-abolitionist defund movements. My perspective, though, is that we should abolish the office of the sheriff.

I came to this position because of the history of sheriff reform movements. These were primarily movements during both Reconstruction, when Black men could vote, and the civil rights era of the 1960s. In the South, Black citizens wanted to elect sheriffs who were either Black or who would at least represent the interests of Black residents. The idea was to elect a sheriff that would protect Black residents from the Klan and protect their property rights. This ask was met with extremely violent oppression, often with wholesale massacres. In fact, many Southern officials said repeatedly that they were okay with Black state legislators or even federal legislators, but they really, really did not want Black sheriffs. They did not want the Black population represented by a sheriff because, to them, the sheriff was the person in the county who controlled everything important at the local level. Black Southerners tried again during the civil rights movement to elect either Black sheriffs or sheriffs who were not violent toward Black people. But it was incredibly hard.

The first thing to understand about any movement to reform a criminal legal system, especially sheriffs, is that the backlash is very violent and oppressive. We also see this with the backlash to the movement to defund the police.

There are many specific reasons why electing reform-minded sheriffs is very hard. One of them is that they have to live in the county, so there is a slimmer selection. A lot of sheriff elections are not big-money elections, so if people are running for sheriff, they really often don’t have a lot of resources. Sheriffs can often hire and fire at will, so they frequently fire disloyal employees who support their opponent.

Some people have had success with state legislative reform, such as in Washington state, where advocates are trying to legislate sheriffs through state legislative reforms. With the rise of the constitutional sheriff movement, sheriffs of all stripes increasingly argue that they can’t be legislated. So when successful reforms happen, they tend to apply only to urban police. Sheriffs tend to be excluded. It’s also a product of county versus urban organizing. County organizing is not something that the left has done a really good job with.

At the end of the day, however, passing legislation is difficult and the opposition is immense. The office has proven itself resistant to reform, which, in my view, makes abolishing the office an important goal.

Another reason I call for abolishing the sheriff’s office entirely is that there are just too many law enforcement organizations in the United States. There are nearly 20,000 different law enforcement agencies. The country is awash in different police agencies of all sizes. There are also practical reasons, such as the fact that elected sheriffs spend more money than unelected law enforcement, and they are more prone to misconduct and fraud. It’s an office that is already run badly, so you are not missing much if they were to go away. Data has also shown that they kill a disproportionate number of people compared to police officers.

In rural areas, where the sheriff is almost a quasi-spiritual guide to a lot of people, abolishing the office is controversial. But in the case of most sheriff departments, the deputies are poorly trained political appointees who do not need to be dealing with community issues, especially when the people being thrown into county jails are often those struggling with mental illness or substance-use disorders, or are simply too poor to afford bail. These are not people who should be interfacing with law enforcement. People struggling with poverty, their health, or substance use should receive services outside of the carceral system.

Sheriffs also present a political problem. The history of the sheriff’s role in convict leasing—kidnapping mostly Black men and boys off the street and sending them away to “work off” a criminal sentence—is so problematic and has not really in this country been dealt with or discussed. There is now a movement to talk about labor in penal institutions, particularly in state prisons. But convict leasing was an incredibly violent and cruel practice that sheriffs did on purpose and profited from. And there has not been any urge to make reparations for that. Although convict leasing is now technically illegal, it continues to be true that in most county jails prisoners are usually required to work at the sheriff’s discretion. On this fact alone, we shouldn’t have sheriff’s offices anymore. It is an abuse of authority; a law enforcement office shouldn’t be allowed to continue profiteering off of the incarcerated, particularly when you get to be the person who incarcerates them.

DB: You say something along the lines of, we have too many police, we have too many people in prison in this country, and we need to be moving toward reducing or eliminating various parts of the carceral system—but we really need to abolish sheriffs.

Is that emphasis because you want to put a spotlight on sheriffs, who have had this long and dangerous history and have not really gotten their due, or do you see it as something that is related to a broader project of abolishing the carceral apparatus?

JP: It is a little bit of both. If you are talking abolition strategy, there are many parts of the criminal legal system that could be done away with, and abolishing sheriffs is one part of that. I do think it is important to distinguish the defund-the-police movement from what the far-right imagines, which is a destruction of the administrative state. Some people want to make a horseshoe argument, which argues that both the far right and the far left envision a kind of administrative anarchy. I would argue this is not the ask. The far left wants to feel safe, free from violence. That is different from what the far right asks, which is the liberty to oppress and take what you want. The idea behind the constitutional sheriff movement and militia movements is the liberty to terrorize and take what you want by force if necessary.

Aside from abolishing sheriffs, the other thing we can do is disaggregate their jobs. Because they have a jail and because they get to police, they get to wield a lot of power, to buy cars and drones and helicopters, and to even control a workforce. We should disaggregate jailing from policing, which, if you think about it, on its face is a ridiculous concept: that someone can profit from the labor of the people they went out and jailed is astonishing. So disaggregating those functions, at a minimum, could have some positive effects. We want to diminish the use of jails, but as it stands, sheriffs have very little incentive to diminish the use of jails. Jails are the source of their power, in fact, and in the short period of time in which we saw a substantial amount of decarceration, sheriffs, in their quest to remain relevant, were very eager to repurpose their jails for the treatment of people with drug-use disorders or to house the houseless—they were very eager to put other people in the jails who had not been arrested for a crime. So disaggregating the jail from the sheriff’s purview would go a long way to opening a path for greater decarceration and substantially reduce the power of sheriffs.

It is an easy ask to get rid of a department that is inefficient, incompetent, and kills more people. Much of the promised Trump agenda—mass deportations and oppressive surveillance—relies on the cooperation of county sheriffs, many of whom are already so far to the right that they regularly ignore the will of the people they are allegedly elected to serve. If the Democrats or the resistance movement are concerned about saving democracy, then why aren’t we agitating to get rid of sheriffs? 

Featured image: Jessica Pishko. Photograph courtesy of Jessica Pishko.