The Texas Department of Corrections (now the Texas Department of Criminal Justice) manages offenders in state prisons, state jails and contracted private correctional facilities. The agency also provides funding and certain oversight of community supervision and is responsible for the supervision of offenders released from prison on parole or mandatory supervision. These are administrative correspondence and subject files from the executive director's office, dating 1961-1962, 1967-1969, 1974-1976. The earlier files primarily cover the period when Dr. George Beto served as director, from 1962 to 1972; the 1974-1976 files are from the term of W.J. Estelle, Jr. Materials found within these files include incoming and outgoing correspondence, memoranda, acknowledgments, invitations, directives to farm or program managers, clippings, graduation materials for inmates receiving their GED (announcements, programs, speaking invitations, etc.), and a self-study report on the Windham School District. The most extensively covered topics in these records include agriculture production and education. Other issues covered to a lesser degree, mainly in the miscellaneous correspondence files, include alcoholic counseling, building a prison in West Texas, complaints about conditions, victim compensation, prisoner exchanges with Mexico, the prison rodeo, and choosing a new director for the prison in 1962. Correspondents include the executive director, assistant directors, wardens, other state agencies, local officials, universities, and the general public. These records represent only a small part of the directors' files that were briefly inspected by an archivist in 1995 on site in Huntsville. At that time, there were an estimated 80 to 100 cubic feet of similar records from the office, dating about 1960-1980s. When this series was reviewed again in 1997, most of the records present in 1995 had been destroyed. The materials remaining are clearly incomplete: one group of records dates from 1961 to 1962, 1967 to 1969 and covers A-F of the filing system, and the other group of two cubic feet of loose materials contains mostly unfoldered materials from 1974 to 1976. Four other administrative correspondence series can be found in the overall TDCJ finding aid, Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice records (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tslac/20127/tsl-20127.html): Administrative correspondence, Board of Corrections; Administrative correspondence, insanity of inmates; Administrative correspondence, Assistant Director for Special Services; and Administrative files, Deputy Director; containing records from the 1950s to the 1980s. Another series, Administrative policy files, contains directives and policies from the 1960s-1980s, similar to the ones found in these records, but of a more administrative nature. This series was removed from the overall TDJC finding aid due to the electronic file size limitations imposed by the online finding aid web site (TARO). If you are reading this electronically, click on the following link to access the overall finding aid, Texas Department of Criminal Justice records (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tslac/20127/tsl-20127.html). If you are reading this in paper in the Archives search room, this finding aid is found in a separate divider within the same binder.
