Record-breaking high temperatures in Texas and throughout the southern states in late June, driven by climate change, forced everyone who can, to rely on air conditioning to avoid the heat’s life-threatening impact. But inside the state prisons and jails throughout the South, and beyond, without air conditioning, the heat was inescapable and deadly.
The U.S. has the world’s highest incarceration rate, with one quarter of the global total of inmates. And the state of Texas tops all other states with 160,000 incarcerated human beings. More than two-thirds of Texas's 100 state jails and prisons don’t have air conditioning in most living areas. That means more than 100,000 people in those Texas prisons were forced to endure sweltering, torture chamber-like heat around the clock, with no air conditioning in their cells.1
“It’s inhumane. We were like feral animals locked in this giant cage.”
How bad was it? During the heat wave, temperatures inside these prisons regularly reached 110 degrees and above! A June 28 report in the Texas Tribune described how one 35-year-old prisoner at Huntsville, collapsed while doing prison work outside in the sun and died of what officials said was cardiac arrest. He “was one of at least five prisoners since mid-June to die of a reported heart attack or cardiac arrest in uncooled prisons where the regions' outdoor heat indices were above 100 degrees, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of prison death reports and weather data.”
Emails sent from inmates to their families described the horrors: “I’m having a really hard time breathing right now,” one inmate in Texas wrote. “It’s so humid you can’t breathe … We were in AC for shakedown yesterday all morning and when we came back it was 118 degrees in here and going from AC to that made me sick to the point I threw up my electrolyte drink and I just felt sick and nauseous all day… not sure how long ima last here in the heat.”
Another wrote: “We are still not getting water. They don’t give us respite at all. It’s very hot, we only have one big fan. They don’t give us respite showers AT ALL.” A female prisoner who served two years in a Texas state jail for drug possession told a reporter, “All of these women that were suffering with me had not a lot of time [before release], and they feared that they were getting death sentences. Several times I told my mom, ‘I hope I make it out of here.'” She said:
It is suffocating. It’s terrifying just to feel like you’re cooking. I remember asking my bunkie, “do you think our brains are frying?” Some days, we wouldn’t have water. I saw a lot of women have seizures because of the heat. It is inhumane. We were like feral [wild] animals locked in this giant cage.
Some prisoners flooded their jail cell floors with water from the sinks and toilets and lay down on the concrete, hoping for relief. Others in desperate shape set fire to sheets and mattresses to get the attention of the guards. In one prison, the inmates kept lookout for one another, then began shouting and banging the bars when someone collapsed: “Man Down!”
A Cruel, Conscious Policy
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) denied that there was any truth to these desperate cries for help from the prisoners. According to their spokesperson, “We take numerous precautions to lessen the effects of hot temperatures for those incarcerated within our facilities. These efforts work.” They reported prisoners who died of heart attacks and heart failure, but none of the deaths during these excruciating periods were called “heat-related.”
In fact, the TDCJ has not reported a single heat-related death since 2012. Yet, a study by researchers at Brown University School of Public Health published in November 2022 found higher death rates among people in prisons without air conditioning compared to those in climate-controlled institutions. The study found that 13 percent of Texas prison deaths between 2001 and 2019 “may be attributed to extreme heat during warm months in Texas prisons without universal air conditioning.” That’s a total of 271 deaths!
A 2019 Prison Policy Initiative report—Cruel and unusual punishment: When states don’t provide air conditioning in prison—found that “13 states in the hottest regions of the country ... have refused to install air conditioning in their prisons, creating unbearable and dangerous conditions for incarcerated people.”2
They concluded that “[r]efusing to install air conditioning is a matter not just of short-term cost savings, but of appearing tough on crime. State and local governments go to astonishing lengths to avoid installing air conditioning in prisons.”
Massive numbers of the incarcerated in this country are being tortured, and increasing numbers dying, from intolerable heat—because of intentional policies enforced not only by the fascist forces in power in those southern states but by those who rule this system overall. The horrendous, needless deaths and suffering are another example that under this system of capitalist-imperialism, the lives of oppressed people count for nothing.
