At its 1989 peak the TDC ran twenty-seven prison units across more than 100,000 acres of Texas farmland — most of it bought back from the convict-lease plantations the state had once leased its prisoners to. Each unit had its own crop, its own warden, its own legend. Click a star on the map.
Tap a star to highlight a unit. Locations stylized; not to scale.
The original Texas penitentiary. Twenty-foot red brick walls, a textile factory, the central administration, the death house. Every TDC inmate, until 1965, was processed here. The execution chamber — and every Texas execution since 1924 — has been carried out in the corner of this compound. It was also the scene, in the summer of 1974, of the eleven-day Carrasco hostage siege — the longest such standoff in the history of American prisons.
Originally the women's farm of the TDC, named for prison commissioner Thomas Jewett Goree. Its inmates formed the "Goree Girls" string band, broadcast weekly on Houston radio in the 1940s — the first all-female prison band in the country.
Built across the highway from the Walls. For decades it housed the system's psychiatric and elderly inmates. It was here, in 1972, that an inmate named David Ruiz wrote out his complaint to the federal court.
Twelve thousand acres of bottomland on the Trinity River. The hardest unit in the system — the place sent men were sent to break, and where, in 1934, Bonnie and Clyde drove up to the wood line and freed five inmates in a hail of fire.
Named for Governor "Pa" Ferguson. Built under O.B. Ellis as the system's prison for first-offense young men, with academic and vocational schooling at its core.
Twenty-two thousand acres in Tennessee Colony. At one time the largest prison in the United States by inmate population. Named for prison board chairman H. H. "Pete" Coffield.
Bought from the Sugar Land sugar planters who had leased its convicts since 1878. Cane, then cotton, then a cattle ranch. Lightnin' Hopkins's father did time here. So did much of Texas blues.
Across the Brazos from Ramsey. Folklorist John A. Lomax recorded prisoners here in 1933 — songs that would become the canon of American work-song scholarship.
One of the oldest farm units. Cane, cotton, vegetables. Inmates from Clemens worked the State Cemetery and built much of the highway between Brazoria and Angleton.
Named, perhaps darkly, for the impossibility of escape across the surrounding marsh. The hot squad of Retrieve was Texas folklore by the 1940s.
Imperial / Central Farm. Sugar capital of Texas. The unit's cemetery, rediscovered in 2018, holds the remains of 95 convict-leased Black men — the bones beneath the fields.
The pre-release and trusty unit, on the Harlem prison farm tract. Its dairy and hog operation supplied the entire system.
One of the prison farms transferred from the Texas Youth Council. After 1981 it became the women's death row, then the female maximum-security campus.
The former state schools for boys, transferred to the TDC after court-ordered juvenile reforms. A whole town's economy is the prisons.
The first new women's unit built after Goree was decommissioned for women. Industrial garment plant; the women sewed the system's own uniforms.
By 1965 the Texas Department of Corrections operated more than 100,000 acres of farmland — fields of cotton, sugarcane, rice, sorghum, and vegetables; herds of dairy cattle, beef cattle, hogs, and horses; an entire feed mill at the Wynne Unit and a textile factory inside the Walls. The TDC raised, slaughtered, and ate most of what fed itself, and sold the rest to the state at cost. Self-supporting was the boast. Cheap was the truth.
The land was worked by men in white. The horses were ridden by men in gray. The bell rang at dawn and again at dusk. For more than a century the rhythm of an East Texas day — sunup, work, sundown, count — was the rhythm of the system.