Eastham Unit

Eastham Unit is a Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison for men, located in unincorporated Houston County, Texas GPS Coordinates 30.978106, -95.632274. The 12,789 acres prison is located at the dead end of Farm to Market Road 230, near Lovelady and 13 miles west of Trinity. Eastham, nicknamed "the Ham," is 40 miles up the Trinity River from the Polunsky Unit in West Livingston, and it is about one-third of the distance between Polunsky and the Christina Crain Unit in Gatesville. Robert Perkinson, author of Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire, said that while the TDCJ and other agencies operate many types of prisons and jails in Texas, "if any unit stands for the rest," it would be Eastham.
In 1972 prisoners at Eastham filed Ruiz v. Estelle, a class action law suit against the Texas Department of Corrections , as the TDCJ was then known, and won. In 1979 the court found conditions of imprisonment within the TDC prison system constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the United States Constitution. While there were many names included in the lawsuit, David Ruiz was the first name listed and that is how the case was titled.

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