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Arizona History
"This place should not be called a prison; we are all kindly treated, well-fed and taught useful trades. It should bear the name of an industrial school, and all who are so-inclined have the opportunity to improve the mind, in addition to learning some handicrafts that will give the inmate the opportunity of earning a good living wherever he may go." One can only wonder whether the inmate who wrote the 1886 letter was serving his time in the same institution as the one who complained about the Territorial Prison in a Spanish-language newspaper in 1890. Had the passage of four years changed the institution from being a mind-improving facility teaching inmates handicrafts and trade opportunities into a torture chamber for Spanish-speaking inmates? The Territorial Prison at Yuma wasn't meant to be a pleasure resort, so the complaints about it which were published in a Spanish-language newspaper in 1890 probably weren't taken too seriously by every person. The Phoenix paper, El Fronterizo, published the letters to its editor which had been written by four men: Juan Noriega, Emilio Levan, Santiago Lopez and Loreto Pina. They accused the prison administration of deliberately mistreating inmates of Mexican origin. Another Phoenix paper, The Arizona Republican, picked up the El Fronterizo story and published it in English. Among the other charges made by the Hispanic newspaper were that Mexican inmates were given less food than others, weren't provided with enough clothing to keep warm during the winter, and had to wait six months for a new pair of pants even though their old ones were worn out and replacements they received were in bad condition. Another complaint the paper printed about the prison was that the inmates weren't given tobacco or other items which the editor believed they needed. It reported that the excuse used by prison authorities for refusing such requests was that the territorial government wasn't providing the institution with enough money to meet all its needs. The El Fronterizo complaints about the prison also included claims that inmates were put to work making adobes by the guards. It alleged the Americans were ignorant about how to make adobes, with the resulting bricks of a poor quality. Prisoner Manuel Barela was the subject of another complaint. El Fronterizo alleged that he had been put to work at the home of the prison superintendent a few days before his sentence expired. While employed there, Barela was accused of stealing a watch from the residence. As a punishment, he was throw into the prison cell known as the rattlesnake room or dark cell and not released when his term expired. Whether the cell actually contained snakes wasn't reported in the story, and one can only imagine why it had that name. The Yuma Times newspaper came to the defense of the prison administration in the Barela case. Editor Trippel claimed that prisoners had "personally misled the visitors." In his article defending the prison administration on June 4, 1890, the editor reported that the theft of the watch had happened nine months before El Fronterizo printed his story. It reported that the evidence that Barela took the watch from the superintendent's home was overwhelming. The complaint about prisoners not being provided with tobacco was dismissed with the claim that they got money to buy tobacco by making items such as canes, boxes and laces in their spare time. It added that the prison was not required by law to furnish tobacco to the inmates. Anyone who has ever visited the Yuma Territorial Prison Museum in the hot summer months knows that the inmates there weren't in a pleasure resort. Without any air conditioning such as we have today, it must have been miserable being caged in one of those cells in July or August. If it shouldn't have been called a prison as the 1886 letter writer believed, perhaps hellhole might have been a better description. Calling it an industrial school as the letter writer wanted to do wasn't an accurate description of Yuma's Territorial Prison. Frank Love is a Yuma historian.  |
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