Sending Money to Gurney When He's About to Transfer

The Money Follows the Number, Not the Unit

A deposit into the TDCJ Inmate Trust Fund is keyed to the person’s eight-digit TDCJ number. It is not held by the Gurney Unit, officially the Joe F. Gurney Transfer Facility, and it does not have to be re-sent when he moves. If he transfers to Coffield, to Michael, or to a prison on the other side of Texas, the balance goes with him.

That is worth stating plainly here because Gurney is where people arrive. Families sending money to an intake facility often hold off, on the assumption that a deposit made now will be lost or stuck when the transfer comes. It will not be.

Two rules decide whether the deposit lands at all, and neither has anything to do with which unit he is in.

Only approved senders can deposit. Since September 1, 2020, TDCJ has restricted deposits to people on the incarcerated person’s Visitors List or phone list. If you are on neither, the deposit is rejected no matter how it was sent. Getting onto the Visitors List is something he initiates, on Form RO-1, and it is worth sorting out before the first deposit instead of after a failed one.

The number has to be right. Money orders go to the Inmate Trust Fund, PO Box 60, Huntsville, TX 77342-0060, with his full commitment name and TDCJ number. Cash and personal checks are returned. Deposits of $500 or more are held for 14 days before they post.

Note that none of that goes to Palestine. The trust fund is centralised in Huntsville, so a money order addressed to the Gurney Unit itself is going to the wrong place.

The Two Ways to Send It

TDCJ takes deposits into the Inmate Trust Fund two main ways, and both need his full commitment name and his eight-digit TDCJ number.

Online, through eCommDirect. This is TDCJ’s own deposit service. It posts faster than mail and it charges a fee, which varies by the amount sent and by the method. TDCJ does not publish a fixed fee schedule, so the amount is shown to you before you confirm the deposit.

By mail, with a money order. Send it to:

Inmate Trust Fund
PO Box 60
Huntsville, TX 77342-0060

Write his full commitment name and TDCJ number on the money order itself, not only on the envelope. This route has no fee, and it is slower.

Two things get a deposit rejected outright regardless of route: cash and personal checks are returned, and so is anything from a sender who is not on his Visitors List or phone list.

What the Money Pays For

The trust fund balance covers commissary purchases, and it can fund his side of phone calls through inmate debit if that is how you have set calls up.

TDCJ caps commissary spending at $105 per two-week period. That number is worth knowing before you decide how much to send, because a larger deposit does not let him buy more in a given period. It sits in the account until the next one.

At an intake facility there is one more wrinkle. Commissary access depends on being settled enough at a unit to have a spend cycle, so someone who arrives and moves on quickly may not draw the balance down at the rate you expect. The money is not going anywhere, but do not read a flat balance as a sign the deposit failed.

If He Transfers Before the Deposit Clears

The balance moves with the person, so the money is not lost. What can change is when he can spend it.

A transfer interrupts commissary access while the receiving unit processes the arrival, and a deposit of $500 or more is already sitting through its own 14-day hold. Those two delays can stack. A deposit made the week of a transfer may be spendable considerably later than one made into a settled assignment, without anything having gone wrong.

The one thing genuinely worth confirming first is the assignment itself, on the TDCJ locator, using his number. Not because the money would go astray, but because the same locator check tells you whether a visit or a letter is about to be sent to the wrong prison, and those do not follow him automatically.