C. A. Holliday Transfer Facility
Prison in Texas, United States

The Holliday Transfer Facility (TDCJ Identification Code: NF, also referred to as the Holliday Transfer Unit), is a Texas Department of Criminal Justice transfer facility for men located in Huntsville, Texas. Holliday is along Interstate 45 and .5 miles (0.80 km) north of Texas State Highway 30. The unit, on a 1,412-acre (571 ha) plot of land, is co-located with the Wynne Unit.
Holliday, one of the largest transfer facilities in Texas, is across the street from the Texas Prison Museum. Holliday is one of two prisons in the TDCJ that, as of 2003, is named after an African-American.
History
Richard Watkins, a senior African-American prison warden, led an effort to have a prison named for C. A. Holliday, an African-American community activist and pastor in the Huntsville area. Watkins sent many letters to Governor of Texas Ann Richards, asking her to name a prison after Holliday. The $30 million Holliday Unit, with a capacity of around 2,000 beds, opened in January 1994. Cigarette smoking at Holliday was forbidden since the facility's opening, while a TDCJ-wide smoking ban, stemming from a November 18, 1994 Texas Board of Criminal Justice unanimous decision to forbid smoking at all TDCJ facilities, began on March 1, 1995.
Facility
Holliday, an industrial-scale complex, has sheet metal siding and low sloping roofs.
The public source identifies “C. A. Holliday Transfer Facility” as prison in Texas, United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Holliday, Transfer and Facility.
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This entry incorporates text from “C. A. Holliday Transfer Facility” 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.