T · D · C
Chapter IV · The Ledgers

By the Numbers

The TDC was a great accountant of itself. It tallied bushels and bales, daily counts and hospital admissions, calories served and miles driven. Some of those numbers tell the story plainly. Some of them tell it by what they leave out.

1
Founding inmate
William G. Sansom, horse theft, three years. Admitted October 1, 1849.
140
Years as the TDC
From the State Penitentiary Act of 1849 through the agency's renaming on September 1, 1989.
27
Units at peak
Operating in 1989, the year the system was renamed and reorganized as the TDCJ.
100,000+
Acres of prison farmland
Cotton, rice, sugarcane, sorghum, vegetables; the largest single agricultural enterprise in Texas in the 1960s.
361
Executions in "Old Sparky"
Between February 8, 1924 and July 30, 1964. The chair, built by inmates, is at the Texas Prison Museum.
1st
Lethal injection on Earth
Charles Brooks Jr., December 7, 1982. The State of Texas inaugurated the modern method of execution.
161
Days of trial in Ruiz
The longest trial in the history of the United States district courts. 349 witnesses; 1,565 exhibits.
$1.65
Cost per inmate per day, 1968
Lowest of any state prison system in the United States. The TDC was, by design, the cheapest in the country.
Population

Inmates held by the TDC, by year.

A century and a half on a horizontal line. Numbers approximate; sources cited at the bottom.

Inmate Count, 1850 – 1989

★ End-of-fiscal-year populations · selected years
1850192
1865~700
1880~2,000
1900~4,000
1920~5,200
1940~6,500
1960~12,000
1970~20,000
1980~29,500
1989~40,000

Bars scaled to the 1989 inmate count. Population grew at roughly 7% per year through the late 1970s, breaching the federal cap that triggered the Ruiz consent decree.

The Death House

Executions at the Walls Unit, 1924 – 1989.

Until 1924, executions were carried out by county sheriffs at the local courthouse. After centralization, every Texas execution has taken place in a single small room at the Walls Unit in Huntsville.

Executions by Decade

★ As recorded in the Texas Execution Archive
1920s 81
1930s 100
1940s 86
1950s 66
1960s 29
1970s 0 *
1980s 32

★ Furman v. Georgia (1972) suspended capital punishment nationwide. Texas resumed executions in December 1982 — by lethal injection, the first in the world.

Curiosities

Numbers from the margins of the ledger.

2 / 3
Of staff dead, 1867 yellow fever
The epidemic also killed roughly a third of the inmate population. The cemetery on Bowers Hill grew accordingly.
$50
Hard Money purse
The bag tied between a Brahma bull's horns at the Texas Prison Rodeo. Equivalent to a month's free-world wages in 1935.
52
Inmates killed in the Texas Syndicate war
1984–1985. The collapse of the building-tender system produced a vacuum that gangs filled with knives.
15
Pages, handwritten
The length of the David Ruiz petition that brought the federal courts down on the entire system.
95
Bodies, Sugar Land 95
Convict-leased Black men buried, unmarked, on the Imperial / Central Farm. Re-discovered in 2018 during school construction.
$0.21
Hourly inmate wage, 1965
Paid in scrip redeemable at the unit commissary for tobacco, candy, and writing paper. Field labor was unpaid.
~30k
Average rodeo gate, 1955
The grandstand seated 15,000. Standing room and the parking-lot overflow doubled it on a clear October Sunday.
2002
Final dismissal of Ruiz
Thirty years after David Ruiz mailed his complaint. The longest-running prison-conditions case in American history.
11
Days, the Carrasco siege
July 24 – August 3, 1974. Federico Gómez Carrasco and two accomplices held sixteen hostages in the Walls Unit library — the longest prison-hostage standoff in U.S. history.
A Note on the Numbers

What the books did not record.

The TDC, like every prison system, kept the books it was required to keep. Inmate counts, daily rations, escapes, executions, dollars per pound of cotton. It did not, generally, keep records of beatings; of the pace of the hoe squad on a 105-degree day; of the men who came in young and left old, or did not leave at all. Those numbers exist only in oral histories, court testimony, and the long memory of families. We have tried, where we can, to point to those records too.

Sources for figures on this page: the Texas State Auditor's Office, the Texas Prison Museum's executions registry, Texas Tough (Perkinson, 2010), The Walls Came Tumbling Down (Martin & Ekland-Olson, 1987), the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics historical series, and the published findings of Ruiz v. Estelle (S.D. Tex. 1980).