'Texas prison burials are a gentle touch in a punitive system'

There's an interesting if macabre story from the NY Times today with the same title as this post on a mostly hidden aspect of the system: the solemn, longstanding administration of a pauper's field for Texas inmates in Hunstsville dating from the earliest days of statehood in the 1840s (the Texas Republic had before then repeatedly rejected a central prison, which was pushed through in the first Texas state Legislature). See especially the accompanying slide show.

No last meal, anymore, but a final place to rest one's bones.

 Inmates who die in TDCJ custody are buried there if no one claims the body, though "many family members fail to claim the bodies because they cannot afford burial expenses and want the prison agency to pay the costs instead. The same relatives who declined to claim the body will then travel to Huntsville to attend the state-paid services at the cemetery." According to the Times. "Prison officials have verified 2,100 inmates who are buried at the cemetery, but they say there may be additional graves. Professor [Franklin] Wilson recently photographed every headstone and estimated that there were more than 3,000 graves."

RELATED: From the Texas Prison Museum: “The Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery is located about a mile southeast of the Walls Unit on Bowers Boulevard. It covers twenty-two acres between Sycamore and Sixteenth Streets. The land was donated to Governor John Ireland in 1855 by Sanford Gibbs and George W. Grant. The deed describes the land as 'the same upon which convicts from the State Penitentiary have been buried since the establishment of said institution, said Burial Ground having been located there-on by mistake.'”