As Texas Enters Another Hot Summer, Lawmakers Kill Effort to Cool Sweltering Prisons

“The reality is in Texas, we are cooking people in prison.”

Joe Raedle/Newsmakers/Getty

In the summer, Texas prisons become hell itself. Most prisons lack air conditioning in housing areas, and temperatures inside can rise above 100 degrees. People confined to their cells have few or no options for keeping themselves cool. Some break prison windows, trying to increase airflow. Lovinah Igbani used to cover herself with a wet sheet, according to the Texas Observer; it would dry in 30 minutes. Without options, she would lay on her bunk with her cellmate’s sweat dripping onto her. At least 13 people have died of heat stroke over the last decade.

Yet as Texas enters another summer, state lawmakers have once again killed a bill to require air conditioning in prisons, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Every couple of years, Texas legislators consider a bill to require air conditioning in state correctional facilities. And every couple of years, it goes nowhere. This year’s version of the air-conditioning bill looked like it might change that pattern. This spring, after Igbani told the Texas House Corrections Committee about her experience inside, the bill passed the Texas House with bipartisan support, with just 18 members voting against it. “The reality is in Texas, we are cooking people in prison,” Terry Canales, a Democratic legislator who has repeatedly introduced prison air conditioning bills, told the House during a debate.

But in the Senate, the bill didn’t even get a hearing, according to the Dallas Morning NewsThe Texas legislative session ends tomorrow. So the law, again, will remain the same: County jails are required to maintain temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees. But for the 117,000 people serving state sentences in prison, there are no similar regulations. Those who are lucky will get one of the prison system’s 34,000 air conditioned beds. The others, like Igbani, will have to make do.

Part of the reason the bill faces such an uphill battle: The Texas Department of Criminal Justice claims that it will cost $1.1 billion to install A/C and $140 million annually to maintain it. (The department has inflated those estimates before, according to the Texas Observer.) This year’s bill capped spending at $300 million over the next seven years, phasing in air conditioning gradually. Meanwhile, the state has paid to fight 17 lawsuits involving the stifling heat inside its facilities. 

This year, Texas prisons also faced the opposite problem. A historic cold snap sent temperatures plummeting, leading prisoners to set fires inside a tier to keep warm, according to prisoners’ families:

Nichole J., whose husband lives in the Clemens rows, also says that people on the rows were trying to light fires to stay warm, using toilet paper, scrap paper, and in one case, their socks as kindling. According to Nichole, her husband asked to see the doctor because he was coughing and struggling to breathe in the cold, but the request was denied. “My husband said it was hard to catch his breath,” she said. To stay warm, she explains, he heats water in his hot pot, fills a water bottle, and tucks it into his socks. “Many of the inmates, my husband included, fear going to sleep because they they’re afraid that they’re going to die in their sleep,” Nichole says. On Thursday, she says he told her corrections officers had done a “blanket check” that morning—taking away extra blankets from anyone who had more than one…

Every day, Nichole says, when her husband talks to their children, her oldest son comes back with questions. “He’s like, ‘Mom, why are they treating him like that? Mom, why don’t they give him blankets? Mom, Dad is cold.’ Earlier, he was like, ‘Mom, Dad said he can’t feel his toes.’” Each time, she has to tell him there is nothing she can do. “I’m trying,” she tells me. “And it’s sad when your children come up to you and they express concern. They’re children. They shouldn’t have to go through that. They shouldn’t have to wonder if their dad is coming home.” 

Yet the state corrections department responded to reports of the fires, clogged toilets, and blankets being taken away from prisoners with dismissal: “You know, what I think is the biggest headline coming out of this is the fact that we really have seen no significant issues coming out of this very significant event,” Jeremy Desel, communications director for TDCJ, told me, adding that the department’s command structure and communications had “no reported incidents of any level of significance.”

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate