Terrell Unit
Prison in Rosharon, Texas

The Charles T. Terrell Unit is a Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison located in unincorporated Brazoria County, Texas, with a Rosharon, Texas postal address; it is not inside the Rosharon census-designated place. The facility is located on Farm to Market Road 655, 4 miles (6.4 km) west of Farm to Market Road 521. The prison, has about 16,369 acres (6,624 ha) of land, is co-located with Ramsey Unit and Stringfellow Unit. The prison is in Rosharon, and about 35 miles (56 km) south of Houston.
History
The prison opened in September 1983. The Terrell Unit was originally the Ramsey III Unit. After the previous Terrell Unit (now the Polunsky Unit) in West Livingston, Texas began to receive death row inmates, the facility's namesake, a Dallas insurance executive named Charles Terrell, wanted his name off of the prison; as a result his name was transferred to another prison. The Texas Board of Criminal Justice voted to rename the Ramsey III Unit on July 20, 2001.
In 2008 a state investigation began in regards to accusations that a cabal of prison guards is organizing large scale smuggling of goods into the unit. A prison guard at the unit sent a complaint to Jerry Madden, a member of the Texas House of Representatives, saying that corruption was occurring at the unit.
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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 Jun 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7703422. Authority coordinates are 29.310, -95.537. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1983, 2001 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Terrell 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.