Without AC, Texan Prisons Sentence People to Unsafe Heat

CLIMATEWIRE | To survive the heat in her Texas prison cell, Marci Marie Simmons scooped water out of the toilet and slept in a puddle on the concrete floor.

She spent her days tending to corn and other crops on the 1,200-acre farm surrounding the Lane Murray Unit, a women’s prison in central Texas. At night, the heat inside the cells was often worse than the heat outside.

“What that feels like is the inside of a hot car in the summer,” said Simmons, who was released in 2023 after serving 10 years for theft. “There’s no relief.”

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Simmons’ story is common in the Texas state prison system, the nation’s largest, which now faces a legal challenge that says the heat conditions constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

A federal judge in Austin is deciding whether to grant relief to the state’s 123,000 inmates after a four-day hearing that ended Aug. 2.

The plaintiffs, including Simmons and a coalition of groups that advocate for prisoners’ rights, are asking U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman for an order that could require the state to air condition most of its lockups — a move they say will save lives.

“If the judge rules in our favor I believe that this will set a precedent for all the Southern state prisons to provide humane temperatures,” said Simmons, outreach coordinator for the Justice-Impacted Women’s Alliance and who testified at the hearing.

As the number of heat waves and heat-related deaths increase nationally due in part to climate change, researchers and prison-reform advocates say the country’s prison population is uniquely vulnerable.

Many people in prison are at a higher risk of suffering heatstroke because they take medication for heart problems or mental illness, the lawsuit says.

Researchers have found that the heat index inside many of the Texas’ 100 prison buildings can exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

About 70 percent of the cells in the Texas system lack air conditioning, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world — 1.9 million are behind bars. The rates are highest in Texas and other Southern states, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

Inmates in Texas are the most exposed to extreme heat, followed by prisoners in Florida, Arizona and Louisiana, according to a paper published in March by researchers at Columbia University, Montana State University and other schools. The paper calculated the number of jails and prisons in which temperatures exceeded the level that the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health considers dangerous for workers.

At nearly half U.S. prisons and jails, the number of high-heat days increased between 1982 and 2020. The number jumped by about seven days a year on average in Texas and by 22 days a year in Florida, the paper found.

“This problem’s not going away any time soon,” said Cascade Tuholske, an assistant professor at Montana State and a study author who advocates expanded air conditioning. “For incarcerated people, it is a solvable problem.”

Prison ‘should not be comfortable’

In Arizona, the state Department of Corrections is installing air conditioning and evaporative cooling systems known as swamp coolers in prisons.

The Louisiana Legislature approved funds to add air conditioning at two small prisons. A federal lawsuit aims to force the state to improve conditions at the notorious Angola prison farm, where most cells lack air conditioning and inmates must do farm work in extreme heat.

Lawmakers in Texas and Florida have tried to address prison heat with little success.

Twenty-five percent of prison cells in Florida lack air conditioning, according to a consultant’s report. Two measures to install cooling in the rest of the system died in the state Legislature this year.

In Texas, the prison system installed air conditioning at some units after a series of wrongful death and class-action suits. A recent settlement in 2018 required the state to provide air conditioning for 1,300 inmates at the Wallace Pack Unit, which houses geriatric prisoners.

A Texas legislative committee has recommended since 2018 installing air conditioning in the rest of the system, but conservative lawmakers objected.

“Jail should always be safe, but it should not be comfortable,” state Rep. Tony Tinderholt (R) said in a letter responding to the committee report in 2018. “I cannot in good conscience support a plan to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to air condition all state jails for a matter of comfort.”

Last year, the Texas House of Representatives approved more than $500 million to pay for the first phase of air conditioning in the bulk of the prison system. The state Senate, controlled by the conservative wing of the Republican Party, cut the funding.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice says it got $85 million for air conditioning.

Democratic state legislators and prison-reform groups say Texas has more money for air conditioning in its prisons, noting the state’s $27 billion reserve fund.

State Rep. Terry Canales (D) said at a committee hearing in 2023 that prison conditions endanger both inmates and correctional officers. “It is not humane what we’re doing,” Canales said. Prison staffers “are now dealing with a population of people that are hot and angry and frustrated — and now they’re outnumbered.”

Two-thirds of the inmates in Texas are Black or Hispanic compared to 53 percent of the state’s overall population.

Politicians have been able to ignore prison conditions in Texas and across the South because of long-standing myths that Black and Hispanic people are better able to tolerate the heat, said Jeff Goodell, author of “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.”

“Anyone who thinks there’s not a racial aspect in this is profoundly ignorant of the history of incarceration and the history of racial justice in Texas,” Goodell said.

Heat mitigation in pig barns

The Texas lawsuit was filed by Bernhardt Tiede, who was sentenced to life in prison — later reduced to 99 years — for the 1996 murder of an elderly woman named Marjorie Nugent who had befriended him. The story was turned into a 2011 movie called “Bernie.”

Tiede, who is now in his 60s and has diabetes and heart disease, sued in 2023, arguing that the extreme heat in prison had exacerbated his health problems. The state attorney general’s office failed to present any evidence during the early stages of the case, and a judge ordered that Tiede be moved to an air-conditioned cell.

Civil rights groups joined the suit this spring and offered evidence about extreme conditions throughout the system.

A federal judge in Austin is expected to rule in two to three weeks on issuing a preliminary injunction that could force the state to maintain cooler temperatures for the prison population while the case is resolved.

Federal prisons in Texas are already air conditioned, the suit says. The federal Bureau of Prisons recommends keeping its prisons close to 76 degrees in the summer.

The Texas Commission on Jail Standards requires county and city lockups to be cooled below 85 degrees. The regulations don’t apply to the state prison system.

The lawsuit says the prison system, which grows much of its own food and uses misters to mitigate heat in its pig barns, has no similar protections for inmates. Most of Texas’ prison buildings date from the jail-building boom of the 1980s and ’90s.

As temperatures rise due to climate change, conditions will continue to get worse, said Jeff Edwards, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. “From an environmental standpoint, you’ve cooked up a system that is going to kill people,” he said.

State officials acknowledge at least 10 people died from heatstroke during a record-setting heat wave in 2011 but have said no inmates have died from the heat since 2012. Academic researchers and civil-rights groups said the toll is higher and likely to get worse as climate change pushes up average temperatures.

The state says it provides ice water, fans, cold showers and other protection for prisoners, and it assigns inmates to air-conditioned cells based on their medical history and other risk factors. The lawsuit says those are largely ineffective.

“Heat deaths haven’t magically stopped,” the suit says. It cites autopsies showing several people died from a brutal heat wave in 2023, including a 43-year-old man whose body temperature was 108 degrees when he died.

A 2022 study by Brown University and Harvard University estimated that 14 people a year died from heat-related illnesses in Texas lockdowns between 2001 and 2019, accounting for about 13 percent of inmate deaths. The risk of dying in custody rose 0.7 percent for every 1-degree increase above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, the study said.

The state says in its response to the suit that previous court cases don’t require it to provide air conditioning for every inmate, only for those who are sick or elderly.

“While some prisoners may be vulnerable to heat, others are young and healthy and are much less susceptible,” the state says in court documents. It argues that the organizations suing the state don’t have a claim because they can’t prove that their members have been harmed.

Simmons, the former inmate and current plaintiff, said she saw plenty of people suffering during her incarceration.

“I saw staff members pass out, I saw other ladies pass out. I saw heat-induced seizures, ambulances coming to the unit several times a week,” Simmons said. “We’re not asking to make incarcerated folks comfortable. The state has a responsibility to safely house the incarcerated population that is in its care.”