James H. Byrd Jr. Unit
prison in Huntsville, Texas
The James "Jay" H. Byrd Jr. Unit (DU) is a Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison for men located in Huntsville, Texas. The 93 acres (38 ha) diagnostic unit, established in May 1964, is 1 mile (1.6 km) north of Downtown Huntsville on Farm to Market Road 247. The prison was named after James H. Byrd, a former prison warden.
The facility is the TDCJ's primary prisoner intake facility in Huntsville. All male death row offenders and male offenders with life imprisonment without parole enter the TDCJ system through Byrd. From there, the inmates with life without parole sentences go on to their assigned facilities. Male death row offenders go on to the Allan B. Polunsky Unit.
“James H. Byrd Jr. Unit” enters the record as prison in Huntsville, Texas. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what James, Byrd and Unit can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6135106. Authority coordinates are 30.737, -95.555. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “James H. Byrd Jr. Unit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.