Overview:
At a time when climate change is pushing summer temperatures to record levels, advocates say the deliberate lack of air conditioning in Texas prisons constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
There was seemingly no escaping the Texas heat last summer. During a string of excessively hot days late in the season there were a string of deaths across the state: children died, elderly people died, a Black postal worker in Dallas died.
But according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the state’s prisons — only a third of which have air conditioning — were perfectly safe. Not only were there no heat-related deaths of prisoners last year, according to the agency, state records say there have been none at all since 2012.
Of course, that very rosy official picture of the prison population during Texas’s second hottest summer on record leaves out a lot. Last summer, The Texas Tribune reported that 41 prisoners died during the heatwave, and while there was no cause of death listed at the time for many of those people, over a dozen died of either cardiac arrest or heart failure.
The state’s inmate population, 44% of whom are Black, survived extremely dangerous conditions last summer, when the interior temperatures in some prisons reached as high as 130 degrees.
Now, prisoners and their advocates are seeking protection ahead of what is expected to be another blistering summer. In late April a complaint was filed by attorneys on behalf of all prisoners in units without air conditioning. They want a federal judge to declare the stifling conditions constitute cruel and unusual punishment, and set 85 degrees as the maximum temperature for state-run prisons (Texas jails are already required to keep temps below 85 degrees).
The complaint doesn’t mince words: “Texas prisoners are being cooked to death,” it reads.
“What is truly infuriating is the failure to acknowledge that everyone in the system — all 130,000 prisoners — are at direct risk of being impacted by something that has a simple solution that has been around since the 1930s, and that is air conditioning,” attorney Jeff Edwards said during a press conference, according to The Texas Tribune.
The problem is by no means limited to Texas. According to a 2019 report from the Prison Policy Initiative, 95% of households in the South have A/C, yet “states around the South have refused to install air conditioning in their prisons, creating unbearable and dangerous conditions for incarcerated people.”
Prisoners in Stillwater, Minn., refused to return to lockup during another historic heatwave that struck the midwest last summer, leading to a lockdown of the facility. And earlier this year, the administration of California Governor Gavin Newsom killed plans to establish new heat protection for indoor workers in the state due to the high costs of adding air conditioning to the state’s prisons, which would have been covered by the measure.
April marked the 11th straight month of record-breaking global temperatures, and it won’t come as any kind of surprise if May brings the world to a full year of historic heat. Which is to say, there’s no expectation that this summer will be any cooler in Texas — or in California or Minnesota for that matter.
While the District Court has yet to respond to the complaint, temperatures are tipping higher across Texas, with a high of 90 degrees forecast in Houston tomorrow.