Gurney Unit Visiting Hours. Confirm He's Still There First

The Hours, and What Each Column Means

TDCJ publishes visiting hours per unit on its Unit Visitation Schedule. the Joe F. Gurney Transfer Facility’s row, read on August 29, 2026:

Visit type	Days	Hours
Contact	Saturday and Sunday	8:00 AM to 5:30 PM
Regular	Saturday and Sunday	8:00 AM to 5:30 PM
Restricted	Saturday and Sunday	8:00 AM to 5:30 PM
Video/Tablet	Saturday and Sunday	8:00 AM to 5:30 PM

One of those column names causes more confusion than the rest. TDCJ’s own visitation rules state that general visits “are also referred to as non-contact and regular visits.” So Regular does not mean an ordinary contact visit. It means the opposite: a visit through a barrier. Families read the word on the schedule, picture sitting at a table together, and find out at the gate.

Contact is the one that allows physical contact. Restricted is a tighter category again. TDCJ does not define it in its published visitation rules, so ask the visiting sergeant on (903) 928-3118 which type applies to him.

Gurney has no weekday visiting. TDCJ policy allows the CID director to expand visiting days to include Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays at units he designates. Three units show that expansion on the published schedule, and only Bill Clements is still listed in TDCJ’s unit directory, where those days cover video visits only. The other two, Neal and Rudd, are not in the current directory, so they are not units you can plan a visit around. Any page telling you Gurney has weekday afternoon slots has copied the policy clause and misread it as a schedule.

Before a First Visit: Intake Has to Finish

This is where Gurney differs from a settled prison, and it is worth knowing before you plan anything.

Under TDCJ’s visitation rules, no incarcerated person receives general visits until his Visitors List has been processed, and no contact visits until intake is complete and a custody level has been assigned. Gurney is an intake and receiving facility. A newly arrived person is, by definition, in the middle of exactly that process.

So a first visit at Gurney can be delayed by the paperwork and not by anything either of you did wrong. The list has to clear, and the classification has to land. If he arrived recently and a visit request is refused, this is usually why.

He Has to Put You on the List First

The Visitors List is built by the incarcerated person, not by you. TDCJ’s rules say it directly: the inmate, and not a visitor, must request that someone be added, and a visitor cannot request to be placed on a list. The only exception is a court-appointed guardian.

How it works:

• At intake he submits up to 10 names on Form RO-1, Request for Placement on Visitors List, giving each person’s physical address, phone number and relationship.
• The warden or a designee approves or denies each name.
• At an institutional unit the list can be changed once every six months. Corrections to an existing entry, like a new address or a name change, can be made at any time without restarting that clock.
• TDCJ does not publish Form RO-1 as a downloadable PDF. You cannot fill it in or submit it. He gets it from unit staff.

If you are removed from a list, that decision can be appealed in writing to the Director’s Review Committee, PO Box 99, Huntsville, TX 77342, within 14 days of the written notice.

Booking the Visit

Separately from the Visitors List, visitors set up an account on TDCJ’s Online Visitation Portal. The two are not the same thing, and confusing them is the most common reason a family thinks it is approved when it is not. The portal account schedules visits. It does not put you on the list.

Setting it up: create the account with a valid email address, confirm using the key TDCJ emails you, answer the background questions, complete your profile, then add him using his TDCJ number or SID number, select your relationship and choose Request Approval. The relationship sits in Pending Approval until the unit clears it, then moves to Verified Inmate Relations. The portal is available to residents of the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Visits are arranged through the portal or the warden’s office between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM, at least one day and not more than seven days ahead. People in security detention are scheduled the same way, on the weekend, within that same one-to-seven-day window.

What to Wear

TDCJ applies one dress code statewide and the duty warden has the final say at the gate. What is published:

• Nothing tight, revealing or see-through.
• Sleeveless tops are allowed as long as shoulders are covered.
• Shorts and skirts must be no shorter than three inches above the middle of the knee.
• Open-toe shoes and flip-flops are permitted.

The last one surprises people, because plenty of prisons ban them. At a TDCJ unit they are fine.

What You Can Carry In

• Money for vending: up to $35, in coins only. Bills are not allowed inside. A credit or debit card is.
• Photo ID: every visitor aged 18 or over needs current, official government-issued photo identification showing a current physical address. A student ID is not accepted for an adult. Visitors aged 17 and under may be asked for a birth certificate, state ID or student ID.
• With an infant: up to three diapers, wipes, and two bottles, carried in a clear bag.
• A small wallet, a clear resealable bag or a change purse is allowed.

Leave phones and anything else in the car.

Bringing Children

Children aged 17 and under do not count toward the two-adult limit, so bringing a child does not cost you a visitor slot.

TDCJ also allows hardship visits, which let a 16- or 17-year-old on the Visitors List visit an incarcerated parent or legal guardian without an adult escort. That needs the warden’s written approval ahead of time.

Travelling More Than 250 Miles

Palestine is a long way from most of Texas, and TDCJ has two allowances for that, both at the warden’s discretion and both arranged in advance:

• Extended visits of up to four hours, for visitors travelling more than 250 miles one way.
• Long-distance special visits of up to eight hours in total, capped at four hours a day across two consecutive days.

Separately, a split visit lets the visit be divided into one- or two-hour blocks across up to four adults, which is useful when more people have come than can sit down at once. Ask for it at check-in, not at the end.

If something goes wrong on the day, TDCJ runs an Ombudsman Visitation Hotline on (936) 437-4927, toll-free (844) 476-1289, staffed 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM on Saturdays and Sundays. Almost no other guide publishes it.

Video Visits

Each incarcerated person is allowed one 60-minute video visit per month in addition to in-person visiting. It runs either through Securus at $10 a visit or through a tablet kiosk at no cost.

Gurney’s Video/Tablet column is populated on TDCJ’s schedule with the same Saturday and Sunday 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM window, so video visits here are booked through the TDCJ portal alongside in-person ones. That is not true everywhere: at some units the Video column is empty and video runs through Securus separately.

Check the Locator the Week of Your Visit

At most prisons this is ordinary advice. At Gurney it is the point of the page.

TDCJ lists Inmate Intake and Receiving among the facility’s operations and publishes Transient among its custody levels, so a share of the population is here between assignments. The 2018 PREA audit, the most recent one on file, counted roughly 200 intakes a week. A visit planned three weeks out can be a visit to the wrong prison.

The other four units on this property make that easier to get wrong, not harder. Coffield, Michael, Powledge and Beto share the same 20,528 acres, and a transfer between them changes the address, the ZIP and the phone number while barely changing the map.

None of that is a reason to hold off. It is a reason to confirm the assignment in the same week you travel, on the TDCJ locator, using his TDCJ number.

What a Transfer Facility Is, and Is Not

TDCJ’s own page for Gurney is headed “Correctional Institutions Division - Transfer Facility,” while TDCJ’s index table types the same facility as a prison. Both pages are current, and the mismatch is not an error.

The Texas Legislature repealed the statutory transfer facility designation in HB 719, effective September 1, 2021. The Senate Research Center’s analysis of that bill describes what the category had meant: facilities built in the early 1990s to relieve county jail overcrowding, holding people for up to two years before moving them on. The label went away. The function did not.

For a visit, the practical difference is small. The hours, the Visitors List rules and the two-hour period are the same statewide rules that apply at any TDCJ prison. What changes is how long the answer stays true.