CRIME & PUNISHMENT IN EARLY ARIZONA

Crime committed and punishment exacted was one defining characteristic of the Old West. Arizona was no exception.

Forty-four times a crime so outraged the community that citizens organized, took the law into their own hands, and lynched sixty-six men. Homicides were quite numerous, and every murder was characterized as “the most cold-blooded in the annals of the Territory,” but only forty-one murders resulted in a legal hanging and fifty-three men were hanged over five decades.

From July 1875 to September 1909 three thousand forty men and twenty-nine women were registered at the prison near Yuma and, when that aging institution was closed, five hundred eighty-nine prisoner were registered at the prison in Florence. In total, three thousand six hundred fifty-eight Arizonan’s served terms in prison during the Territorial period, and an untold number served sentences in jail for lesser offenses.

Lawlessness was an industry in old Arizona, but never a profitable one.

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