It’s hard to imagine an endeavor more hopelessly quixotic than trying to generate sympathy for prison inmates. But let’s take a shot at it:
It’s always hot in Texas in the summer, but this summer is something special. Or is it? The heat that hovered over my home state last week before moving east was a notable weather event, but in all likelihood it was no more than another small step toward our warming world’s so-called new normal.
Excessive heat is the most dangerous weather, and increased heat mortality is a trend that’s likely to head in only one direction: Up.
In fact, at least 13 people died in Texas last week from the heat, including a father and stepson who were hiking in Big Bend National Park and a Dallas postal worker.
So this was serious heat, even for Texas. Most Texans took various precautions, especially spending as much time as possible in air-conditioned spaces. But approximately 112,000 Texans did not have that option or any other. They’re inmates in the two-thirds of Texas prisons that do not have air conditioning.
Some inmates died from the inescapable heat in their poorly ventilated cells. The rest just suffered. Last week J. David Goodman, writing for the New York Times, reported on conditions in Texas prisons without air conditioning. Temperatures inside cells can reach 110 degrees, and some inmates overflow their sinks and toilets in order to find some relief by lying on wet concrete floors.
The conditions sound insufferable. Luke King, a prisoner incarcerated in Huntsville for theft and burglary, put it this way: “Paying for your mistakes is one thing. But living like this is wrong.”
The problem isn’t money. It would take $1 billion to fully air-condition all Texas prisons. But one of the biggest battles in the current special session of the Texas legislature is what to do with a $33 billion budget surplus. The Republican-dominated government wants to return it to taxpayers, but the House and Senate can’t agree on how.
So providing air conditioning for Texas inmates is less a matter of finances than of political will. It’s just hard to get people—maybe especially Republicans—to feel much sympathy for prisoners. Some think that anyone who winds up in prison pretty much deserves whatever happens to him.
As a tea-party friend of mine put it during the COVID pandemic, paraphrasing: If you die from COVID because you’re incarcerated, you had it coming.
This sort of casual disregard for human suffering ignores degrees of guilt. Some are incarcerated for monstrous crimes such as serial murder and child rape. Others made the mistake of burglarizing a convenience store when they were young. Many are in prison for committing drug crimes that have already been legalized in other states. And some small percentage of inmates is actually innocent.
But attempting to correlate the suffering we’re willing to inflict with the sufferer’s guilt disregards an essential principle: How we treat the incarcerated is about who we are, not who they are.
It’s been a long hard slog, but we’ve gradually, if fitfully, left behind many of the barbaric practices of the past: slavery, forced marriages, child labor, female disenfranchisement, corporal punishment (for adults, at least).
Unlike the rest of the developed world, we still cling to capital punishment, and we’re ambivalent about torture.
But the elimination of these uncivilized practices is descriptive of our national character beyond whatever benefits their victims derive. Do child rapists and 9/11 plotters deserve to be tortured? Probably. But we don’t do that (usually) because of who we are.
Of course, it’s possible to live in Texas without air conditioning. When I was a kid in the 1950s, it was a luxury. We didn’t have it, nor did most of our schools. But free citizens have options that prisoners do not.
Furthermore, times have changed. It’s hotter now, for one thing. And our gradually developing capacity for humanity and compassion needs to be encouraged and nurtured. We shouldn’t be a culture that forces its incarcerated citizens to live in misery. As Luke King put it: “…living like this is wrong.”
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