It was nice today with the high reaching 16C and sunny
feeling warmer.
We headed south east to Florence about ½ hour away. This is
a small town which contains a minimum of 5 prisons. There was a state prison, a privately run out of state prison, a border patrol prison, a d.u.i. prison and a sex offender
prison. They were all visible from the highway driving into the town. The towns’ existence seems to be solely on the
presence of the prisons.
We checked out the Prison Outlet store which sells items the
prisoners make and there were two drug related occupants from one of the local establishments
doing community work at this store helping the lady store keeper with
maintenance and cleaning around the building dressed in their bright orange
suits. Inside there was paintings, pottery, basket weaving, t-shits, pajamas
and blue jeans.
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| You can see the two guys in their prison coveralls. |
From there we rode over to the Pinal County Museum a few
blocks away which we found very interesting. There was a wide selection of items to see.
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| If you look just above the coach drivers' hand rail there is a tube which runs into the coach. The rider in the coach can talk to the driver through it. |
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| This was the only women hanged in Arizona. |
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| She made this necklace and sold it to the prison warden to get money to buy a dress for her burial. |
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| The cabinets above show the ropes the people in the pictures were hanged with. The double chair was built to gas two brothers at the same time. |
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| The report showing his last meal. |
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| Electric hair curler |
Along the way we passed a National Guard small arms range.
Go figure - now that the weather is starting to warm up we
are on the move tomorrow (oh well). We saw everything we wanted to see and
stuff we didn’t (snow).
Till tomorrow....
