This story was first published by The Texas Tribunea nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs—and engages with—Texans about public policy, politics, government, and statewide issues.
April signaled the start of blistering heat for much of Texas. And while the summer heat is uncomfortable for many, it can be deadly for the people incarcerated in Texas’ prison system where temperatures regularly reach triple digits.
With another sweltering summer likely ahead, prison rights advocates filed a lawsuit on April 22 against Texas Department of Corrections Executive Director Bryan Collier, arguing that the lack of air conditioning in most Texas prisons amounts to on cruel and unusual punishment.
The filing comes from four nonprofits joining a lawsuit originally filed last August by Bernie Tiede, an inmate who suffered a medical crisis after being housed in a Huntsville cell that reached temperatures of more than 110 degrees. joined. Tiede, a notorious criminal whose 1996 murder of a wealthy widow inspired the movie “Bernie,” was moved to an air-conditioned cell after a court order, but he is not guaranteed to stay there this year.
Last month’s filing expands the plaintiffs’ claims to include every inmate held in unrefrigerated Texas prisons, which has resulted in the deaths of dozens of Texas inmates and cost the state millions of dollars as it faces wrongful-death and civil rights lawsuits. fight.
The plaintiffs are asking that a federal judge in Austin declare the state’s prison policy unconstitutional and require prisons to be kept below 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Texas prisons are already required to keep facilities cooler than 85 degrees, and federal prisons in Texas have a maximum of 76 degrees.
Between June and August last year, the average temperature was 85.3 degrees — the second hottest on record behind 2011. And this year doesn’t look much cooler. The most recent winter season ranked hottest on record for the contiguous US, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Scientists have found that climate change has led to more severe and longer-lasting heat waves. In the past decade, Texas has experienced more than 1,000 days of record heat, compared to a normal decade.
In the hot summer months, those concrete and metal cells can reach more than 130 degrees, formerly incarcerated Texans said during an April 22 press conference. Legal representatives hope to prove that those conditions are unconstitutional.
“What’s really infuriating is the failure to recognize that everyone in the system — all 130,000 inmates — is at direct risk of being affected by something that has a simple fix that’s been around since the 1930s, and it’s air conditioning,” said lawyer. Jeff Edwards told reporters. Edwards was the lead attorney in a 2014 prison rights case that cited the nearly two dozen inmates at the Texas prison who died of heat stroke over the past two decades. That case resulted in a settlementwhere TDCJ agreed to install air conditioning at the Wallace Pack unit near College Station.
About two-thirds of the inmates housed across TDCJ’s facilities live in areas without air conditioning. Advocates and inmates’ families have long fought to cool prisons in a state where summer temperatures regularly exceed triple digits and create dangerous conditions for inmates and correctional officers.
Although the state has not reported a heat-related death since 2012, researchers and inmates’ families dispute those statistics. A 2022 study found that 14 prison deaths per year were related to heat. Last year, a Texas Tribune analysis found that at least 41 people died in uncooled jails during the state’s record-breaking heat wave.
Health problems linked to excessive heat include kidney disease, cardiovascular deaths, respiratory diseases and suicides, Julie Skarha, an epidemiology researcher at Brown University who wrote the 2022 study, told reporters Monday.
Skarha said that while death certificates may not list heat stroke — a condition when the body can no longer control its temperature — as the official cause of death, her research indicates that many inmates died of heat-related causes.
“Heat deaths did not magically stop,” the lawsuit states. “TDCJ simply stopped reporting or allowing them after the multiple wrongful death lawsuits and national news coverage.”
TDCJ spokeswoman Amanda Hernandez declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying the agency does not comment on pending litigation. But she emphasized that the department has been adding more air conditioning units since 2018.
“We’ve worked every year to add cool beds, and we’ll continue to do that,” she said.
She also pointed to the departments’ “Improved Warming Protocols” which is activated from April to October and includes providing ice water to inmates and allows them to purchase fans and cooling towels from the commissary.
Lawyers argue that these mitigation tactics are insufficient to combat the state’s sweltering temperatures. To survive the heat, inmates report having to flood their toilets or sinks and lie in the water on the cell floor to try to cool their bodies, the lawsuit states.
“This is not an unpredictable event,” said attorney Erica Grossman, who is one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs. “It gets hot every summer, and just like every other building in Texas — including buildings that have animals — we cool the building.”
TDCJ staff working in the facilities are similarly affected by the heat, said Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law and LBJ School. The excessive heat permeates all aspects of life in prisons: Staff must do physical work in heavy uniforms in the heat; the heat leads to more violence among those incarcerated; and that leads to more use of violence against prisoners, she said.
The TDCJ states on their heat mitigation protocols that staff are “encouraged to increase their water intake” during the hot summer months and are allowed to wear cooling towels and dri-fit compression shirts.
New research conducted by Skarha found that the number of assaults occurring in non-air-conditioned prisons increased as much as five times during the summer months compared to that number in climate-controlled facilities.
Prison rights advocates say the state could easily fund air conditioning units across its prisons, but has simply been unwilling to do so. During the last legislative session — when the state ran a record surplus — the House proposed spending of $545 million to install air conditioning in most of the prison facilities that lack it. But the final budget did not include any money devoted to air conditioning.
The House also passed an account which requires prisons to be kept between 65 and 85 degrees, which is already required in prisons and most federal facilities. But the bill failed in the more conservative Senate.
“We have the resources. We just don’t seem to have the compassion to do that,” said Rep. Carl Sherman, D-DeSoto, said during the press conference. Sherman was one of the authors of the bill that would have regulated prison temperatures.
The Legislature did appropriate approximately $85 million for “additional deferred maintenance projects,” in Texas prisons, and TDCJ is use that money to pay for air conditioning units. Hernandez estimated that those dollars would provide air conditioning for an estimated 10,000 inmates.
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