Jailhouse Cop

Standing 6 feet 5 inches in his jailhouse blues, with a square jaw and grey stubble, Mark Curran is the inmate in cell No. 2. He is also the sheriff.

He hasn't been charged with any crimes. But Curran, the sheriff of Lake County, Ill., wanted to know the feeling of being caged. So he sentenced himself to a week in lock-up, in Waukegan. "People who have never been in jail," he says wryly, "don't know what it's like to sit on the toilet in full view of everyone."

Lake County, the stretch of area north of Chicago to the Wisconsin border, is a land of extremes-- from the mansions of Lake Forest to the mean streets of Waukegan. The wealthy tend to be white, and the poor are usually African American or Latino. Inside the jail, the other inmates know who Curran is. Some act friendly when he says hello. Others turn away, or greet him with glares.

The sheriff says he understands the reaction, "I'm just another white guy—like the prosecutor, probably; like the person who sold him down the river; like the judge."

Curran, who in 2006 became the first Democrat in 28 years to be elected sheriff in Lake County, shrugs at critics who might accuse him of grandstanding. The 45-year-old career prosecutor, who ran as a Reagan Democrat, says he "couldn't care less about getting re-elected." Go ahead and call it a publicity stunt. "If I hadn't checked myself in[to] jail," he asks, "would I have a chance to talk to NEWSWEEK about the things that I think are important?"

This is what Curran, a devout Catholic, sees as important: telling broken people that they are loved and that they can heal, and teaching them to show their own children that they are loved, too.

In jails across America, he argues, inmates usually have one thing in common: They grew up without a loving father in their lives. And that's an experience which Curran, the son of a tough, old-school Irish-Catholic father, who believed that men shouldn't cry or show emotions, can relate to. Curran's dad was a man who did not hug his son, but rather he slapped him around for misbehaving, Curran says.

Not until his father died, four-years ago, did Curran truly realize how strongly the experience of growing up with an emotionally cold father affected him. On the day his father died, Curran said he was struck by a powerful feeling.

"I was pissed," he says. "I was still waiting for an apology. And now I knew I would never get one."