Texas’ lockdown of its overheated state prisons is worsening an already volatile situation

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) earlier this month put all 104 of its prisons under lockdown, a move that occurred as families of the incarcerated argue that this summer’s extreme heat is killing state inmates.

Experts warn that the crackdown, which began Sept. 6, will only exacerbate already inhumane conditions inside Texas prisons. They caution that it could further spike heat-related deaths and illnesses while worsening dangerous tensions.

Citing a rise in drug-related homicides at its facilities, TDCJ officials said they implemented the lockdown to search for illicit drugs and homemade weapons. The sweep restricted the movement of 129,000 incarcerated people, leaving most locked in their cells 24 hours day, according to advocates.

“It’s harder to get access to water, or ice, or the various initiatives that [TDCJ] has instituted,” Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, said of lockdown conditions. “[The cells] are concrete boxes. So you can imagine just how extraordinarily uncomfortable it can be in these settings.”

Amid one of the hottest summers in Texas history, families of state prisoners have testified that their loved ones are soaking their bedsheets in toilet water, sleeping on the floor, and intentionally getting sent to solitary confinement to escape their un-air conditioned cells. Fewer than a third of Texas’ state prisons are air-conditioned, according to the Associated Press.

While some prisons have slowly resumed normal operations, at press time Monday, most Texas inmates remained locked in their cells, and TDCJ hasn’t said how long it expects the crackdown to last. The opening days of the sweep occurred while temperatures across the state were still regularly cresting over 100 degrees.

“A lot of sentences are turning into death sentences,” Deitch said. “That’s something no civilized society should tolerate.”

Indeed, at least 41 prisoners are suspected to have died in state prisons of heat-related causes this summer alone, according to an analysis by Texas Tribune. Even so, TDCJ officials maintain that there hasn’t been a heat-related death in a Texas prison since 2012.

“Specifically, it would be inaccurate to classify any death this year as a heat-related death as a lot of these are still under investigation and pending final autopsies,” TDCJ spokeswoman Amanda Hernandez said in an emailed statement.

However, experts and advocates said there’s overwhelming evidence that Texas prisoners are being cooked alive.

“A lot of these deaths that we’re seeing are young people in their 30s and 40s, who otherwise have no known health conditions,” Deitch said. “So, common sense tells us that a lot of these deaths may be due to heat-related causes.

Damning testimony

Marci Marie Simmons, a former Texas prisoner turned inmate-rights advocate, accused TDCJ of preventing those under its supervision of knowing how bad their living conditions are.

“They have thermostats in the cells that [guards] cover with electrical tape so you can’t read them,” Simmons said.

Simmons recalled a time during the summer of 2020 when she climbed to the ceiling of her cell and peeled back the tape on the thermostat. It read 136 degrees, even though TDCJ facilities are required to be kept between 65 and 84 degrees.

“That was the ceiling,” Simmons said. “So, even if it was a little cooler where we slept, it was only about 10 degrees less.”

Testimony from prisoners’ families during an August TDCJ meeting painted a similarly bleak picture.

Tona Southards-Naranjo, whose son Jon Anthony Southards, died at Texas’ Huntsville Unit on June 28, said her son had no underlying medical conditions and had spoken to her three times on the phone the day he succumbed to what she believes was extreme heat.

“You see, ladies and gentlemen of the board, I myself turned my son in [out of] tough love,” Southards-Naranjo testified. “I believed in doing so that my son would be rehabilitated, he would pay his debt to society, and he would come home a different man. Two of those things did not happen. He was not rehabilitated, and he did come home a different young man – a dead one.”

The TDCJ locked down the state’s prisons a little over a week after Southards-Naranjo’s impassioned testimony.

Southards’ cause of death remains “unknown,” according to the TDCJ.

Prisoners in some Texas facilities that have air conditioning are unable to access it, said Lorie Dorpinghaus, whose husband is incarcerated at the Segovia Unit in Edinburgh.

“My husband has said that he and the other inmates are able to see the other federal inmates in that unit who are wearing orange jumpsuits and that they can see that they’re being held in a climate-controlled building with air conditioning,” Dorpinghaus told the Current. “While my husband and others are left to suffer, knowing that the unit has air conditioning, but they are not allowed to turn it on.”

Lack of political will

The recent lockdown has only worsened living conditions, according inmates’ to families.

Yvonne Lopez, whose diabetic father Christopher is incarcerated at the Buford Jester III Unit in Richmond, said he hasn’t been able to receive his insulin during the lockdown. Without it, he could die, she added.

The situation has gotten so bad that Lopez’s father risked being sent to solitary confinement because those units are among the few that are air conditioned, she added.

Prison advocates said Texas Republican leaders’ tough-on-crime rhetoric is making state lawmakers reluctant to improve living conditions at state lockups.

“I am always surprised that when I talk to a group of people, how many just say that our state is a penal state,” Simmons said.

While Simmons is hopeful some Texas lawmakers are starting to evolve, it may be a long and slow process to win support for more humane conditions. During the past legislative session, lawmakers in the Texas House passed a bill that would install air conditioning throughout the state’s prison system. That measure died in the Senate.

“It’s pretty obvious that it’s not a priority [in Austin],” Deitch of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab said. “I think what it will take for it to pass the legislature is for them to recognize the humanity of everybody who both lives and works in these facilities.”

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. Deitsch warned that the lockdown, coupled with the fierce Texas heat, is creating a powder keg in the state’s prisons.

“[The heat] can increase the level of violence within the facilities, increased tension between staff and incarcerated people,” she said. “So, I think that the lockdown is really going to exacerbate what is already a very dangerous and tense situation because of the heat.”

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