The Ellen Halbert Unit in Burnet is a female-only substance abuse treatment facility operated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. It houses about 600 women and functions as a Substance Abuse Felony Punishment Facility, which means the entire environment is structured around recovery rather than standard incarceration. The daily experience at Halbert is centered on the therapeutic community model. Your niece will be living and working within a structured treatment program focused on drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Narcotics Anonymous and...

CDCR has launched limited video visiting to allow friends and family to safely connect with incarcerated people, beginning at five institutions by Nov. 28 with more added through the end of the year. In-person visiting remains canceled statewide until further notice as part of the department’s COVID-19 response. Under the new system, each inmate will have the opportunity for a free 30-minute video visit every 30 days. Visits will take place on weekends and holidays, between 8:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. The...

Sending books to an inmate through Amazon is one of the more straightforward ways to get reading material into a facility, but it only works if you follow the facility's specific rules to the letter. Here is how to do it. Go to Amazon and find the book you want to send. At checkout, instead of shipping to your own address, enter the facility's address as the delivery address. The inmate's full legal name and ID number should appear in the...

Sending shoes from the outside directly to an inmate is rarely permitted. Most facilities, particularly federal prisons, do not allow personal footwear to be mailed or brought in by family. The security and contraband concerns around outside packages are tight, and shoes are rarely on the approved items list. The good news is that size 17 is carriable through the federal commissary system. The Bureau of Prisons commissary stocks larger sizes specifically because the inmate population includes people who cannot be...

A 214 number is a Dallas area code, and Wilmer sits just south of Dallas in Dallas County, so it feels like the logical choice. Local should mean cheaper. In the prison phone world, that assumption will cost you money. With Securus, which holds contracts across Texas facilities, including Dallas County, all in-state numbers are actually more expensive than out-of-state numbers. That is not a typo. It runs counter to everything you would expect, but it is how Securus structures its...