Texas prisoners fake suicide attempts to escape heat: lawsuit

Prisons in Texas are so hot that prisoners have been faking suicide attempts so that they can be moved to cooler medical areas, advocates told a federal judge on Tuesday.

Advocates asked U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman to declare the state prison system’s lack of air conditioning as unconstitutionally cruel, saying inmates had also been splashing themselves with toilet water to cool down, the Associated Press (AP) reported.

The suit was originally filed in 2023 by Bernie Tiede, an inmate who claimed his life was in danger due to the heat. The advocacy group Lioness: Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance has since joined as a plaintiff.

On Tuesday, a multi-day hearing began in which plaintiffs argued in favor of enforcing the installment of air conditioning in all Texas prison units. Currently, only around a third of the 100 prison units have full air conditioning; the rest have only partial AC or none at all.

Former inmate and community outreach coordinator for Lioness Marci Marie Simmons told the court that women would fake suicide attempts, or “commit some harm” to themselves to get placed in a cooler medical unit because of the severe heat in the prison blocks.

Simmons was released in 2021 after serving 10 years for felony theft in three different Texas prisons. She said that conditions were “oppressive” and “suffocating,” and that in the summer, “I was in complete survival mode. I felt like a caged animal.”

The conditions are so hot that she said she once saw a kitchen worker bring an egg back to her cell and cook it on the concrete floor.

In 2020, Simmons said she and two other inmates peeled off tape concealing the temperature on a hallway thermometer in one unit and saw it had reached 136 degrees Fahrenheit – an experience which she said “shocked” and “frightened” her.

County jails are required to be maintained between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, prompting the plaintiffs to ask Judge Pitman to require Texas prisons to stand by the same rules.

A study by researchers at Brown, Boston, and Harvard universities from November 2022 found that 13 percent of the deaths in Texas prisons without air conditioning between 2001 and 2019 could be attributed to the heat. At least three inmate deaths in 2023 listed heat as a possible contributing factor in autopsy reports, a report by KUT Radio in Austin found.

The prison advocacy group emphasized the potential for those numbers to increase in light of increasingly extreme temperatures.

Responding to the lawsuit claims, Assistant State Attorney General Marlayne Ellis said the state was constrained by the legislature’s budget, despite wanting to provide more air conditioning. The agency added that fans, towels, and access to a cooler “respite area” were protocols in place for extreme heat.

Simmons said access to those cooler areas was limited to short periods of time; that the coolers of ice water didn’t hold enough to serve an entire prison dorm; and up to 100 women would wait to use a single shower head that was changed from hot to cold water.

Cases relating to the same issue have also been raised in Louisiana, New Mexico, and Georgia. The case in Georgia, filed last week, reported that an inmate died in July 2023 after he was left in an outdoor cell for hours with water, shade, or ice.

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