“Texas’s death chamber is a well-honed machine,” said Robert Perkinson, the author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” a critical history of the Texas prison system.

David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston who has represented more than 100 death row inmates during their appeals, explained the state’s record of seeming success simply. “When you do something a lot, you get good at it,” he said, adding archly, “I think Texas probably does it as well as Iran.”

‘Almost Second Nature’

In Huntsville, a city of 40,000 that cuts through pine forests along Interstate 45, the Walls prison sits like a fortress in the heart of town, roughly half a mile from City Hall, the county courthouse and the campus of Sam Houston State University. Huntsville is part college town, part prison town — there are seven state prisons, including Walls, in the Huntsville area, as well as the headquarters of the state prison agency, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

But many residents do not dwell on the pace of executions. “Unless the high-profile cases are going on, you don’t really know until you read about it the next day in the paper or you hear it on the news that an execution was going on,” said Heike Ness, 48, an insurance agent.

Some of those who work in the system are proud of their expertise. Jim Willett, who was the warden at the Walls prison from 1998 to 2001, oversaw 89 executions. Staff members who prepare prisoners for execution are trained and skilled, he said. The “tie-down team” that straps the prisoners onto the table “can take that man back there and put those straps on perfectly and easily in 30 seconds,” he said. “This may sound odd to an outsider, but they take pride in what they do.” He added, “They’ve done it so often that it’s almost second nature to them.”

Mr. Willett, now retired from the prison, is director of the Texas Prison Museum, about three miles from the Walls prison, which celebrates the institution and, to an extent, its history of execution. It received 31,280 visitors last year.