SEATTLE - Inmate advocacy groups in Texas began on July 30 a multi-day hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to force Texas to fully equip its prison system with air conditioning. Currently holding more than 130,000 inmates, only about a third of its 100 prison units count with full AC with the rest having partial or no air-conditioning at all.
Texas is not the only state facing lawsuits over dangerously hot prisons. Cases have been filed in Louisiana and New Mexico over extreme heat that has led to hundreds of inmate deaths in recent years.
Advocacy groups requested U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman to require Texas to maintain temperatures in prison housing and occupied areas between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the temperature range required by law in county jails.
During July 30th's hearing, Marci Marie Simmons, who moved between three Texas prisons while serving 10 years for felony theft described "oppressive, suffocating" conditions as temperatures rose from spring through summer. She was released in 2021. Simmons testified that she once watched a kitchen worker bring an egg back to her cell and cook it on the concrete floor.
In 2020, a hallway thermometer in one unit reached 136 degrees when Simmons and two other inmates peeled off the tape that was meant to hide the reading, she said.
Last month, the family of Juan Carlos Ramirez Bibiano, an inmate at Telfair State Prison in Georgia, announced a lawsuit against the state's Department of Corrections, accusing officers of leaving Ramirez in an outdoor cell for five hours without water, shade or ice despite the outside temperatures climbing to 96 degrees Fahrenheit. Ramirez died of heart and lung failure as a result of heat exposure that evening.
A November 2022 study by researchers at Brown, Boston and Harvard universities found that 13% of the deaths in Texas prisons without universal air conditioning between 2001 and 2019 may be attributed to extreme heat.
On July 29, the radio station KUT in Austin found that autopsy reports on at least three inmates' deaths in 2023 mentioned heat as a possible contributing factor. However, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said there have been no heat-related deaths in the state's prisons since 2012.
In 2020, the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project documented 6,182 deaths in prisons all across the country compared to 4,240 deaths in 2019 despite a 10% drop in prison population year-to-year. The report also shows that 16 state prison systems saw their mortality rate increase at least 90% from 2019 to 2020.
A report by Prison Policy Initiative found out that hot summer days could be the cause of more deaths across the nation's prisons. Researchers found for every 10 degree increase above the prison location's mean summer temperature, nearly 5% of deaths (from all causes) occurring there could be attributed to the heat.
In response to the advocacy groups' petitions, Assistant State Attorney General Marlayna Ellis said Texas would like to provide more air conditioning but is constrained by the Legislature's budget.
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