On July 3, as a heat dome of historic intensity parked itself over the West Coast, the National Weather Service office in San Francisco issued a dire warning: “It cannot be stressed enough that this is an exceptionally dangerous and lethal situation.” Forecasters expected the life-threatening heat to last for at least the next 10 days.
The warning didn’t matter, though, at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla — the second-largest women’s prison in the United States. A day later, on July 4, as temperatures reached 109 degrees, Adrienne Boulware, 47, stood outside in the prison yard for 15 minutes, waiting to be given her medication.
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Once back inside, she tried to cool off by showering, but with cell temperatures regularly reaching as high as 97 degrees in the prison, she became unresponsive and exhibited signs of heat exhaustion. Boulware died two days later.
So, as Black Americans continue to be imprisoned at a disproportionately high rate, like Boulware, they’re also disproportionately affected by extreme heat in carceral facilities.
When extreme heat hits prison populations that often lack access to air conditioning — or even the freedom to take a cooling shower or get a cup of ice whenever they want to — the results can be dangerous, if not outright deadly.
And as temps get higher and both major lawsuits and heat-related deaths of prisoners garner both headlines and outrage, Grist and The Appeal have co-published a national survey of cooling systems (or the lack thereof) in state prisons across the country, which found that just five states have A/C for all prisoners, and only half of prisoners in 22 states live in a cooled housing unit.
In federal prisons, things look far, far different, according to the survey: over 80% of facilities are fully air-while conditioned.
Everywhere else, the living conditions of incarcerated people are varying degrees of too hot.
The worst culprits are the five states that have effectively no cooling in their prisons: Michigan, New York, Vermont, Maryland, and Mississippi. The few places in the prison infrastructure that have A/C in these states are areas like medical facilities or some specialized housing units.
This year in New York — where over 30,000 people are in state prison, and just about half of incarcerated people are Black — a series of heatwaves started in late June. The Hudson Valley, where many of the state prisons are located, had highs in the upper 90s that month, the kind of temps that cause many of the prison buildings, some of which are nearly 100 years old, to swelter. Prisoners at Sing-Sing, built in 1828, reported sleeping directly on metal bed frames during hot weather to try and stay cooler at night.
“The ceilings and the hallways, they sweat,” one inmate told Lohud. “There’s no air. There’s no ventilation.”
Even cooler parts of the country, like Vermont and parts of Michigan, are seeing higher summer temperatures, and research has found that people who are less accustomed to extreme heat are actually more vulnerable to heat-related illnesses.
In the Southwest, only New Mexico has air conditioning for all housing units across state prisons. In Arizona and Utah, most units have A/C, while Texas and California, perhaps most notoriously, only have cooling in some prisons. In Texas, a lawsuit alleging that prisoners are being “cooked alive” has sought to have hot conditions ruled as cruel and unusual punishments.
When heat waves hit uncooled prisons, there are very few options for relief. Prisoners will sometimes be given extra showering times, or be provided with ice and additional water. Commissaries often have personal fans available for sale, but they can be expensive, especially if someone only has prison wages to rely on — and in some instances, there is a limit of one per person. Mostly, people just have to sweat it out — but are having to do so more and more often.
Leesa Nomura, the statewide membership organizer for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, an inmate advocacy organization, was formerly incarcerated at the same prison as Boulware. In a recent interview, she called hot prison cells “practical death chambers.” And in the days after Boulware’s death, as the heat dome settled over California, shattering high-temperature records, the prison went into lockdown. Nomura said incarcerated women reached out with reports of vents “pumping hot air” and women vomiting.
There are no official records kept of how many people die due to heat in prisons in the United States. But as extreme heat becomes the summertime norm, the lives of more and more incarcerated folks will surely be at risk.
