[10] After the incident occurred, the TDCJ considered moving the death row for men, and the Polunsky Unit was the favored choice for the relocation.

[11] According to the TDCJ, the prison escape attempt had hastened the agency's decision to move death row inmates to a new location.

[5] In February 2000 two death row inmates took a 57-year-old female corrections officer hostage, forcing negotiations involving the warden.

[18] On May 9, 2000,[5] 33-year-old death row inmate Juan Salvez Soria (TDCJ#837[19]), who was scheduled to be executed on July 26, 2000, pulled the arm of 78-year-old William Paul Westbrook, a prison chaplain from Livingston, into his cell.

[4] In May 2013 Mother Jones magazine ranked Polunsky as one of the ten worst prisons in the US, based on Congressional testimony from former inmate Anthony Charles Graves (TDCJ Death Row#999127,[25] released due to overturning of conviction on September 7, 2006[26]) and research conducted by the magazine during a three-year period.

[12] David Casstevens of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram described Polunsky as "a somber complex of putty-gray concrete buildings trimmed in blue on 470 fenced acres.

"[30] Miriam Rozen of the Houston Press said that the unit "sits amid the same kind of lush, green and hilly East Texas terrain that surrounds Governor Bush's lake house 100 miles to the north in Athens.

"[31] Marc Bookman of Mother Jones said that the prison "looks as one might imagine a death row would look—a series of imposing concrete structures surrounded by excessive razor wire and four guard towers.

Polunsky has a kitchen, a medical treatment clinic, psych interview rooms, and classification office space.

[5] Robert Perkinson, author of Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire, said that Polunsky, a white concrete building with blue steel supports, is "functionally designed and pleasantly asymmetrical" and that a person would mistake the building for a community college "if not for the three-inch window slits.

[39] Perkinson said that the wait times that the offenders have before execution make the prison stressful for the inmates, visitors, and employees.

In 2013 James Ridgeway and Jean Casella of Mother Jones stated that "Some have been known to commit suicide or waive their appeals rather than continue living under such conditions.

"[42] In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America, a 2012 book by Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian discusses the Polunsky Unit.

According to one passage: "Whenever a condemned prisoner goes anywhere outside his cell, he must back up to the door, drop to his knees, and extend his hands backward through the narrow slot to be handcuffed.

The whole process of dropping to the knees and extending the arms backward is particularly difficult and painful for the older convicts with arthritis.

The Confession [John Grisham] Paperback: 464 pages; Publisher: Arrow (May 1, 2011); Language: English; ISBN 978-0099545798 The Mexican novel Llegada la hora by Karla Zárate talks about a fictional chef cooking the last meals for Death Row inmates in Polunsky.

Llegada la hora (Spanish) Paperback: 214 pages; Publisher: Dharma Books (June, 2019); Language: Spanish; ISBN 978-607-29-1624-1 The National Public Radio (NPR) Podcast series Consider This devoted an episode about the death row radio station, The Tank 106.5,[46] based on the reporting of Keri Blakinger for the Marshall Project for The Guardian.