Operations
The 584,000 square feet (54,300 m2) facility has twenty-three buildings. David Casstevens of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram described Polunsky as "a somber complex of putty-gray concrete buildings trimmed in blue on 470 fenced acres." Miriam Rozen of the Houston Press said that the unit "sits amid the same kind of lush, green and hilly East Texas terrain that surrounds Governor Bush's lake house 100 miles to the north in Athens." Marc Bookman of Mother Jones said that the prison "looks as one might imagine a death row would look—a series of imposing concrete structures surrounded by excessive razor wire and four guard towers."
The Polunsky Unit was designed to house more problematic and dangerous inmates; the officials designed the unit to be more secure than the older TDCJ units. Throughout its history the unit housed administrative segregation offenders (offenders in solitary confinement due to chronic misbehavior or violence). The building housing death row inmates is separate from the rest of the compound. Polunsky has a kitchen, a medical treatment clinic, psych interview rooms, and classification office space. Robert Perkinson, author of Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire, said that Polunsky, a white concrete building with blue steel supports, is "functionally designed and pleasantly asymmetrical" and that a person would mistake the building for a community college "if not for the three-inch window slits."
Read more about this topic: Allan B. Polunsky Unit
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