This summer, Texas hasn’t escaped the climate-crisis-driven heat waves that are cooking the rest of the country, with June bringing the highest temperatures ever recorded in the cities of Laredo, Del Rio, San Angelo, and Junction, while this July may be the hottest month in world history, according to climate scientists. And it’s even worse inside Texas prisons.
Roughly 70 out of the state’s 100 prisons don’t have widespread air conditioning – many lack any form of AC – according to an investigation from Texas Tribune. This leaves inmates to suffer through heat so severe it’s often fatal, according to incarcerated people and criminal justice advocates.
“I have lived without air conditioning in this cell for the past seven summers,” Kwaneta Harris, who is housed at the Lane Murray Unit prison in Gatesville, wrote in The Appeal on Friday. “I wasn’t even allowed to shade my window from the sun. On a hot day in July, cells regularly reached 110 degrees.”
Ms Harris said she’s witnessed guards fainting and seen temperatures measured at 129F inside of the facility.
“During heat waves, I pour tepid tap water on the cement floor and my underclothes and lie in it very still,” she added in The Dallas Morning News earlier this month, as a heat dome continued to linger over Texas. “Being sautéed wasn’t part of my plea bargain.”
(The facility recently added temporary AC devices for some inmates.)
At least 32 people died in Texas prisons during the month of June, nine of whom died of heart attacks in cells without air conditioning, Fox 7 Austin reports.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has not reported an official heat-related death since 2012, however, according to KXAN, owing to how it classifies fatalities.
An advocate for cooling Texas prisons walks past a makeshift cell during a rally on the steps of the Texas Capitol, Tuesday, July 18, 2023, in Austin, Texas. The group is calling for an emergency special session to address the deadly heat effecting inmates.— (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)
Outside studies, however, suggest that as many as 271 prisoners may have died of heat-related causes in Texas prisons without AC in the last two decades.
Advocates have pushed Texas, a state with both a $33bn surplus and one of the largest prison budgets in the country, to invest in more air conditioning for its prisons, which will continue to bake as the climate crisis worsens.
This year, a variety of bills in the Texas state legislature were proposed that would invest more in this life-saving technology, but none succeeded in passing the House and Senate. One bill HB 1708, which advanced from the House with bipartisan support, allocated $390m for such investment, but ultimately failed.
“We’re not talking about luxury. We’re talking about literally making sure people have air that they can breathe and not have to struggle and end up dying on a cell floor because you’ve cooked them — that’s the type of heat we’re talking about,” Jennifer Toon, project director for Lioness: Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, told CNHI last month.
“When people are sentenced to prison, we take away their freedom as the punishment for the crime. They’re not sent there to be tortured or to suffer; their crime is answered by taking away their freedom,” she added.
Earlier this month, activists put a mock prison cell up in front of the state capitol, ahead of testimony from family members of those who died in prison of what they argue are heat-related causes.
“They’re cooking our babies alive,” said Tona Southards Naranjo, whose son Jon died in prison. “I’m mad.”
Climate scientists warn that we are entering the “era of global boiling,” in which what were once record-breaking high temperatures will become commonplace, putting numerous people at risk.
Heatwaves are known as “silent killers” and kill more people than other forms of extreme weather driven by global heating.
