The Texas heat dome showed how vulnerable incarcerated individuals are to heat waves. In a warming world, that’s becoming an increasingly deadly problem.
(Bloomberg) — Texas was among the hottest places on Earth last week as a heat wave brought misery from Mexico to Florida. While residents across the region struggled to stay cool, the extreme heat took a particularly severe toll on those who could least protect themselves, particularly incarcerated people.
According to the Texas Tribune, at least nine people in Texas prisons died as temperatures in the state reached triple digits. These deaths illustrate the unique dangers incarcerated people face when extreme weather hits, dangers that will only grow as heat waves, droughts and hurricanes become more frequent due to climate change.
The exact impact the heat had on incarcerated people in Texas last week, let alone the death toll, is unclear because the state prison system hasn’t classified a death as heat-related in more than a decade. But a 2022 study found that between 2001 and 2019, roughly 13% of deaths in Texas prisons during warm months could be attributed to extreme heat. That estimate is 30 times higher than the number of heat-related deaths in the general US population.
The Texas heat wave was fueled by a heat dome — that is, hot air trapped under a stagnant bubble of high pressure. 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 climate physics at Columbia University. “And the longer it lasts in the same location, the hotter it gets because the sun’s constantly heating [things] up. There’s no relief.”
The searing heat last week was made five times more likely because of climate change, according to research nonprofit Climate Central. The heat dome drove especially extreme temperatures because it was essentially adding heat to an already overheated system.
Incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to high temperatures not just because they lack air conditioning but because prison architecture makes staying cool difficult. Windows, if they exist at all, typically don’t open, limiting ventilation and cross breezes that can lower indoor temperatures by at least a few degrees.
“There have been reports of an inside temperature of 149F,” Julie Skarha, a lead author on the 2022 study who recently received her PhD in epidemiology from Brown University, said of Texas prisons. “The temperature people are experiencing is extreme.”
After a postal worker collapsed and died from the heat during the recent heat wave, the USPS moved postal carriers’ start times to 7:30 a.m. to limit their exposure to the hottest times of the day. But these kinds of behavioral changes to cool down “are all things that might not be possible for those on the inside,” said Skarha. “Taking a cold shower when you want, that’s not possible for everyone. Drinking as much water as you want, water isn’t available 24/7 in some of these facilities like we might assume. Also like clothing, maybe we change what kind of clothing we’re wearing to help cool down. That’s also not an option inside.”
Two-thirds of Texas prisons lack the obvious solution: air conditioning. The same is also true for prisons in other similarly hot states. In 2022, a Florida spokesperson told USA Today that only a quarter of the state’s prisons were fully air conditioned. Only 15% of Alabama prisons were air conditioned as of 2022.
The lack of air conditioning in US prisons stands in stark contrast to availability outside of them. Nationwide, nearly 90% of households have air conditioning. That number creeps up in the Southeast to 95% of households.
“We would not build any kind of new building except a prison without adding air conditioning,” said David C. Fathi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project.
“It’s pretty hard to buy a new home in the US in the last 20 years that doesn’t have air conditioning, no matter where you live,” Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, told CityLab in 2019. Data from the US Energy Information Administration shows that 86% of homes built between 2016 and 2020 had central air conditioning while less than 0.1% of homes did not have any air conditioning at all.
Fathi’s office has sued a number of correctional departments for not air conditioning their prisons. Courts in states such as Mississippi and Wisconsin have found that failure to abate extreme heat violates the Eighth Amendment, which includes a clause against cruel and unusual punishment. But despite these rulings, prisons still lag behind the rest of the country when it comes to air conditioning. Earlier this year, Texas’s legislature allocated no direct funding to air conditioning prisons despite a $32.7 billion surplus in the two-year budget.
“I think the only explanation [for the lack of air conditioning] is a desire to be seen as harming prisoners,” said Fathi. “And we sometimes hear politicians say this explicitly, ‘I don’t want prisoners to have air conditioning.’ ”
In 2014, voters in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, approved a new jail only after local leaders promised there would be no air conditioning. Two years later, in 2016, Louisiana spent over $1 million fighting a lawsuit — four times the cost of installing air conditioning, according to an expert testimony — to install air conditioning on death row. Similarly, Texas paid more than $7.3 million in legal fees opposing air conditioning the geriatric unit of one state prison. After a 2018 settlement, the state agreed to cool the prison at a cost of less than $4 million.
“That tells you that this is not a rational economic decision that’s being made,” said Fathi. “This is a performative political decision that’s being made to harm prisoners.”
It’s not just Southern states where people are at risk. Skarha has also authored a separate broader study on heat-related deaths in prisons. “I looked at what regions of the US see the most increase in heat-related deaths on extreme behavior for that specific region,” said Skarha. “It was in the Northeast.”
Other forms of extreme weather being worsened by climate change also threaten those incarcerated across the country. During hurricanes, for example, it is common for incarcerated people to remain in prisons in the path of the storm. The same is true for wildfires.
Skarha’s research also found that incarcerated people 65 years old and up saw increased mortality when temperatures rose. In a warming world, Fathi pointed out that those vulnerabilities, coupled with what he called “brutally long sentences,” are among the factors that are making prisons increasingly unsafe without proper cooling. So, too, is the number of mentally ill incarcerated individuals that rely on medications that can make them more susceptible to heat-related illness.
“This problem is truly national in scope, and it’s getting progressively worse,” said Fathi. “Hotter temperatures, and an older, more sick, more mentally ill prison population has truly been a lethal combination.”
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