Most women in Crain live in dormitories described by Leah Karotkin of the Houston Press as "drab" and "low-slung." Most inmates work seven hours per day. Jobs include painting and repairing buildings, maintaining and repairing large equipment such as boiler units, hoeing fields, and fixing potholes.[14] Crain includes a trusty camp, which was one of the first to be built by the TDCJ. The camp, which has no perimeter fence, houses non-violent minimum custody inmates who need less supervision than regular inmates and who are less likely to escape than regular inmates. The trustees live in an open dormitory and work in prisoner and prison guard beauty shops, food service, landscaping, and transportation.[14] Women in the Valley Unit work as beauty operators, clerks, cooks, kitchen workers, and landscape gardeners. Women who cannot work in those jobs work in the Special Projects Program by making crafts; they are permitted to sell their crafts for commisary money, and church groups and prison guards are some of the customers.[13] Crain has 20 beds available for the Sentence Alternative to Incarceration Program, a 90 day program for first time offenders between the ages of 17 and 25. The boot camp is housed in a former infirmary in the Reception Center. 32 isolation cells are reserved for difficult prisoners.[13]
