Prisons Aren’t Remotely Ready for Extreme Weather

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(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 sweltering temperatures took a particularly heavy toll on those least able to protect themselves, especially people confined.

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According to the Texas Tribune, at least nine people have died in Texas prisons as temperatures in the state reached triple digits. These deaths illustrate the unique dangers prisoners face when severe weather strikes, dangers that will only increase as heat waves, droughts, and hurricanes become more frequent due to climate change.

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The exact effect of heat on inmates in Texas last week, not to mention the death toll, is unclear because the state’s prison system has not classified death as heat-related in more than a decade. But a 2022 study found that between 2001 and 2019, nearly 13% of deaths in Texas prisons during the warm months could be attributed to extreme temperatures. This estimate is 30 times higher than the number of heat-related deaths in the general US population.

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The Texas heat wave was being 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’s not really moving anywhere,” said Mingfang Ting, a professor of climate, ocean and climate physics at Columbia University. “And the longer it stays in the same location, the hotter it gets because (things) are constantly heated by the sun. There is no relief.”

According to the nonprofit research organization Climate Central, the likelihood of extreme heat last week increased five times more due to climate change. The heat dome pushed particularly extreme temperatures because it was essentially adding heat to an already overheated system.

Prisoners are particularly exposed to high temperatures not only because they lack air conditioning but because the architecture of the prison makes staying cool difficult. Windows, if they exist at all, usually do not open, limiting ventilation and passing breezes that can lower indoor temperatures by at least a few degrees.

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“There have been reports of an internal temperature of 149 F,” Julie Skaraha, lead author on the 2022 study and who recently received her PhD in epidemiology from Brown University, said of Texas prisons. “The temperature people are suffering from is severe.”

After a postal worker collapsed and died from the heat during a recent heatwave, the USPS moved postal carriers’ start times to 7:30 a.m. to limit their exposure to the hottest part of the day. Skarha said these types of behavior changes to cool “all things that might not be possible for those on the inside”. “Taking a cold shower when you want, it’s not possible for everyone. Drink as much water as you want. Water isn’t available 24/7 in some of these facilities like we might assume. Also like clothes, we might change the type of clothes we wear to help cool off. This is also not an option indoors.”

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Two-thirds of Texas prisons lack the obvious solution: air conditioning. The same is also true of prisons in other very hot countries. In 2022, a Florida spokesperson told USA Today that only a quarter of the state’s prisons will be fully air-conditioned. Only 15% of Alabama prisons were air conditioned as of 2022.

The lack of air conditioning in US prisons contrasts starkly with its availability outside. Nationwide, nearly 90% of homes have air conditioning. In the Southeast that number creeps up to 95% of households.

“We wouldn’t build any kind of new building except a prison without adding air conditioning,” said David Fatehi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

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“It’s very difficult 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 Delasky, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, told CityLab in 2019. The US Energy Information Administration shows that 86% of homes built between 2016 and 2020 have central air conditioning while less than 0.1% of homes have no air conditioning at all.

Fathi’s office sued a number of correctional departments for not conditioning their prisons. Courts in states like Mississippi and Wisconsin have found that failure to mitigate extreme temperatures 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, the Texas legislature did not allocate any direct funding to air conditioning prisons despite a $32.7 billion surplus in the two-year budget.

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“I think the only explanation[for the lack of air conditioning]is wanting to be seen as harming the prisoners,” Fathi said. And we sometimes hear politicians say this outright, “I don’t want prisoners to have air conditioning.” “

In 2014, voters in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, approved a new prison only after local leaders promised there would be no air conditioning. Two years later, in 2016, Louisiana spent more than $1 million suing—four times the cost of installing air conditioning, according to expert testimony—for installing air conditioning on death row. Similarly, Texas paid more than $7.3 million in legal fees to oppose conditioning a geriatric unit in a state prison. After a 2018 settlement, the state agreed to cool the prison at a cost of less than $4 million.

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“This tells you that this is not a rational economic decision to be made,” Fathi said. “This is a performative political decision made to harm the prisoners.”

It’s not just the southern states where people are at risk. Skarha also authored a separate, larger study on heat-related deaths in prisons. “I looked at which areas of the United States experience the greatest increase in heat-related deaths over extreme behavior for that specific area,” Skarha said. “It was in the northeast.”

Other forms of extreme weather exacerbated by climate change also threaten prisoners across the country. During hurricanes, for example, it is common for prison inmates to stay in the path of the storm. The same applies to forest fires.

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Skarha’s research also found that incarcerated people aged 65 and over experienced an increased death rate when temperatures rose. In a warming world, Fathi noted that these weaknesses, along with what he called “brutal long sentences,” are among the factors that make prisons increasingly unsafe without proper cooling. So too is the number of mentally ill prisoners who depend on medications that can make them more susceptible to heat-related illnesses.

“This problem is national in scope, and it is getting progressively worse,” Fathi said. “The higher temperatures, the older, the sicker, the more mentally ill it was a really lethal combination.”

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