Texas Department of Criminal Justice - Headquarters

Headquarters

The TDCJ has its headquarters in Huntsville. The administrative facility, known as the BOT Complex (for its former owner, see below), is located at Spur 59 off Texas Highway 75 North. The complex also faces Interstate 45. The complex includes the Central Region Warehouse and the Huntsville Prison Store. The state of Texas prison system had been headquartered in Huntsville since Texas's founding as a republic, and the TDCJ is the only major state agency not headquartered in Austin, the state capital.

The complex was originally owned by Brown Oil Tools, Inc. (BOT), a subsidiary of Baker Hughes. Completed in 1981, the 600,000-square-foot (56,000 m2) plant had a price tag of $9 million. The plant was built to replace the company's Houston plant. The plant employed 200 people. In 1987 Baker Hughes announced that it would close the plant and consolidate its operations to facilities in Houston; the company said that the Huntsville facility's large capacity caused it to be less efficient at lower operating levels. Judith Crown of the Houston Chronicle described the plant as "relatively modern" in 1987. TDCJ purchased the BOT Complex in 1989.

Historically the Huntsville Unit served as the administrative headquarters of the Texas Prison System; the superintendent and the other executive officers worked in the prison, and all of the central offices of the system's departments and all of the permanent records were located in the prison.

In the two decades leading to 2011, many proposals were placed in the Texas Legislature to move the TDCJ headquarters to Austin. One reason why the proposals failed was because Huntsville-area prison officials opposed the move. In the 1990s John Whitmire, a member of the Texas Senate, made an effort to have the TDCJ headquarters moved. During the last state legislative session before September 1, 2011, Texas House of Representatives member Jerry Madden decided not to ask for the TDCJ headquarters to the moved to Austin.

In August 2011 Whitmire told the Austin American Statesman that he would bring up the idea of moving the TDCJ headquarters to Austin during the next legislative session. Whitmire argued that while a Huntsville headquarters made sense when all of the prison units were in east and southern Texas, since the TDCJ now has facilities around the entire state, the TDCJ headquarters should be consolidated in Austin. Steve Ogden, another state senator, said that a headquarters move is "not going to happen while I’m in office."