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A heat wave that brought agony from Mexico to Florida last week made Texas one of the hottest places on Earth. While everyone in the area tried to stay cool, those who could least protect themselves—particularly those who were incarcerated—were hit particularly hard by the high heat.
According to the Texas Tribune, as the state of Texas experienced triple-digit temperatures, at least nine inmates died.
These fatalities highlight the particular risks that people who are incarcerated take when extreme weather strikes, risks that will only increase as heat waves, droughts, and hurricanes become more common due to climate change.
Because the state jail system hasn’t identified a death as being due to heat in more than ten years, it’s unclear what effect the heat had on those who were incarcerated in Texas last week, let alone the death toll.
But according to a 2022 study, between 2001 and 2019, 13% of deaths that occurred in Texas prisons during the summer could be directly linked to the excessive heat. The number of deaths from heat-related causes in the US population as a whole is 30 times lower than that estimate.
The heat dome, or hot air trapped beneath a still bubble of high pressure, was what caused the Texas heat wave. It’s “a dome because it sits right above you, it doesn’t really move anywhere,” said Mingfang Ting, a professor of climate, ocean, and climatic physics at Columbia University.
And because the sun is always heating things up, the longer it stays in one place, the hotter it gets. There is no solace.
According to research group Climate Central, the scorching heat of last week was made five times more likely by climate change. Because the heat dome simply added heat to an overheated system, it pushed particularly severe temperatures.
People who are incarcerated are particularly susceptible to extreme heat, not only because they lack air conditioning but also because of the challenging construction of prisons.
If there are windows at all, they frequently cannot be opened, which restricts ventilation and prevents cross winds from lowering indoor temperatures by at least a few degrees.
According to Julie Skarha, a main author on the 2022 study and recent graduate of Brown University with a PhD in epidemiology, “there have been reports of an inside temperature of 149F” in Texas prisons. “The temperature that people are experiencing is extreme.”
The USPS changed postal carriers’ start schedules to 7:30 a.m. to reduce their exposure to the warmest times of the day after a postal worker fainted and died from the heat during the current heat wave.
These behavioural adjustments to calm down, however, “are all things that might not be possible for those on the inside,” Skarha added.
“Not everyone has access to the convenience of taking a cold shower whenever they want. Even though we may presume it, not all of these facilities allow unlimited access to water. Similar to clothing, perhaps we switch up our attire to assist us cool off. Additionally, that is not a choice inside.
The simple fix, air conditioning, is absent in two thirds of Texas prisons. The same applies to jails in other states with similar high temperatures.
According to a Florida spokesman who spoke to USA Today in 2022, only 25% of the prisons in the state had complete air conditioning. By 2022, only 15% of Alabama’s jails had air conditioning.
The abundance of air conditioning outside US jails contrasts sharply with the absence of it within. Nearly 90% of homes have air conditioning nationwide. In the Southeast, the figure increases up to 95% of families.
The director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, David C. Fathi, declared that his organisation would not construct any new structure—aside from a prison—without installing air conditioning.
No matter where you live, it’s been difficult to purchase a new home in the US in the past 20 years that doesn’t have air conditioning, according to Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, in a 2019 interview with CityLab.
86% of homes constructed between 2016 and 2020 had central air conditioning, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration, while less than 0.1% of homes had no air conditioning at all.
Several correctional agencies have been sued by Fathi’s office for failing to cool their jails. The Eighth Amendment, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment, has been determined to be violated when excessive heat is not abated, according to courts in states like Wisconsin and Mississippi.
However, despite these decisions, air conditioning in jails continues to lag behind that in the rest of the nation. Despite a $32.7 billion surplus in the two-year budget, Texas’s lawmakers did not provide any direct cash for air-conditioned jails earlier this year.
“I think the only explanation [for the lack of air conditioning] is a desire to not be seen as harming prisoners,” stated Fathi. And occasionally, politicians will state outright something like, “I don’t want prisoners to have air conditioning.”
Only after local officials made a commitment that the new jail in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, wouldn’t have air conditioning, did voters there approve it in 2014.
Two years later, in 2016, Louisiana spent more than $1 million defending itself against a lawsuit – four times the price of installing air conditioning, in an expert’s evidence.
Similar to this, Texas spent more than $7.3 million on legal costs to fight the decision to cool one state prison’s elderly unit. Following a deal in 2018, the state consented to cool the prison for less than $4 million.
That indicates that the decision being made is not being made in a sensible economic manner, Fathi said. “This is a political decision that’s being made in a performative manner to harm prisoners.”
People are at risk in states other than the South as well. Skarha has also written a different, more comprehensive study on heat-related fatalities in jails. “I looked at what regions of the US see the most increase in heat-related deaths on extreme behaviour for that specific region,” Skarha added. It took place in the Northeast.
Those who are incarcerated across the nation are also at risk from other types of extreme weather that is getting worse due to climate change. For instance, it is typical for prisoners to stay in jails located in the storm’s path during storms. For wildfires, the same holds true.
According to Skarha’s findings, rising temperatures were associated with an increase in death among prisoners 65 and older.
Fathi noted that in a warming climate, these vulnerabilities, along with what he called “brutally long sentences,” are among the elements that are making jails without adequate cooling more and more dangerous.
The number of mentally ill prisoners who take medications that may make them more sensitive to heat-related illnesses is also increasing.
“This issue is truly on a national scale, and it’s getting worse,” claimed Fathi. The combination of hotter weather and an older, sicker, and more mentally ill prison population has proven to be fatal.
