Prison Cemetery
The Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery, the state's main prison cemetery, is the place where prisoners not claimed by their families are buried. It is located on 22 acres (8.9 ha) of land on a hill, 1 mile (1.6 km) from the Huntsville Unit and in proximity to Sam Houston State University. It is the largest prison cemetery in the State of Texas. Byrd's first prisoners were interred there in the mid-1800s, and the prison agencies of Texas have maintained the cemetery since then.
The cemetery's current name derives from Joe Byrd, an assistant warden at the Huntsville Unit who, in the 1960s, helped restore and clean the cemetery. As of 2011, each burial has the presence of either the Huntsville Unit warden or a deputy of the Huntsville Unit warden. Prisoners serve as pallbearers, chisel names in headstones, and dig graves using shovels and backhoes.
As of 2012 TDCJ officials confirmed that the cemetery includes remains of 2,100 prisoners. Franklin T. Wilson, an assistant professor of criminology at Indiana State University, photographed all of the graves and concluded that there are over 3,000 graves at the cemetery. Each year, about 100 prisoners are buried at the cemetery, and each burial has a cost of about $2,000. On many occasions, the prisoner's relatives do not attend the funeral.
Read more about this topic: Texas Department Of Criminal Justice
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