[2][3] Opened under the auspices and authority of the recently organized Arizona Territory, the prison accepted its first inmate on July 1, 1876.

[4] For the next 33 years 3,069 prisoners, including 29 women, served sentences there for various crimes ranging from murder to polygamy.

Various classrooms were set up temporarily in the old cellblocks and the hospital was used as an assembly hall.

After the school moved to their new replacement buildings campus at its current modern site of 400 South 6th Avenue, the city of Yuma requisitioned the extensive old stone prison complex for a city jail after 1915.

[9] Yuma Territorial Prison has been featured or mentioned in American Western genre literature, films, and television: