When, after WW2, I came to live in Galveston at the house my parents lived in, there was no air conditioning for the summer’s sweltering heat. They did have a crude (by today’s standards) evaporative cooler set up outside a living room window. That cooler only offered some partial relief from the heat, and only in the living room. When in bed, I just had to sweat out Galveston’s humidified heat.
In those days everyone in Texas had to put up with the stifling heat. The stinking Galveston County jail was not air conditioned. And cars were not air conditioned either. But we all managed to live with the heat. How times have changed.
Texas prisons are not air conditioned. The state has been subjected to several lawsuits because some inmates have died from heat-related illnesses. U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison has called Texas prisons “the closest place on Earth to Hell.”
Disregarding the lawsuits, do you think that Texas prisons should be air conditioned?
I suspect your answer will be ‘Yes’, but not so fast there, partner.
Texas prison inmates are not serving time because they sang off-key in the church choir. They are not serving time for being black. And they are not serving time for using drugs. You could even say they are not serving time for being murderers and rapists.
Prisoners are serving time as punishment for breaking the law. As such they should not be entitled to the comforts of home!
The inmates are not the only ones subjected to the heat. Prison officials have to work in the same hot conditions. The correctional officers’ union has also called for air conditioning their workplace.
Talk about hot prisons … I once picked up an inmate at the Arizona state prison near Florence. The fortress-like prison sat in the middle of the desert, miles from the nearest community. When I was there the outside temperature was over 110 degrees. The place was not air conditioned. Man was it hot. The only saving grace was that the desert heat has a very low humidity. I suspect they also had some heat-related deaths among the inmate population.
As my partner and I were driving the inmate back to Riverside, California to face hot check charges, he complained about the lousy food they served in prison and the hard work he was subjected to. But he never complained about the heat.
It would cost a ton of money to air condition Texas prisons. I do not think the taxpayers should be burdened with the high cost of making people comfortable who are being punished for breaking the law. I would however, air condition all the medical facilities of the prisons, but only the medical facilities and no other parts of the prisons.
We should not turn Texas prisons into penal institutions like a Fed Club Med. If Texas prisons are the closest place on Earth to Hell, well that’s just tough shit punishment.
The degree of extreme heat is much worse than it was 40 years ago. Also, some medications for diabetes, heart problems and psychiatric conditions, make people extremely sensitive to over heating. Judge Ellison order the prisons be brought down to 88 degrees! That is not a comfortable temperature- but at least it is safe and should prevent cruel and unusual punishment as prohibited by the US Constitution. Prisons are NOT just for punishment. They are also supposed to be places of rehabilitation. How we treat prisoners says more about us than about them. Just because they did wrong at some point in their lives does not justify our society behaving wrongly. It is our lives we must guard.
Howie Katz, I will be happy to challenge you 5 hours in a Texas Prison sweat box. There is a big difference between Arizona, where the climate is dry and East Texas where it is humid as all get out.
If inmates weren’t dying from heat-related injuries, I might agree with you. Perhaps these are suitable conditions for Death Row. They aren’t for those in the rest of the system, who were sentenced for something worse than singing off key and something less heinous than Capital Murder.
There are numerous factors that combine to make the heat inside a prison much less bearable than the heat in a frame home, even when the ouside is at the same temperature. It strikes me that people dying is a good indicator that conditions are cruel and unusual.
Hmm. Let’s see…..spend money air conditioning our prisons, or spend money fixing the roads. I think I’ve already reached a decision.
You are heartless and evil.
You’re right. And I’m a strong advocate of the death penalty too. I also believe we should use old sparky again. Putting murderers to sleep like one’s pet dog is not adequate punishment. And while I’m at it, we should also put to death the rapists of infants, toddlers and young teens.
By the way dear Carla, law abiding citizens in the free world also die of heat-related illnesses because they have no air conditioning in their homes.
Heartless and evil. That’s good. I like that. Thank you.
Nobody says that you have to keep the damned prisons at a steady 70 degrees. Yes they are in there for punishment but letting the heat get to 100 inside the cells is additional punishment and inhumane. There is a huge difference between inhumane treatment and punishment! If the prisons tried harder to give decent nourishment and actual mandatory rehabilitation, things would be a lot different. Giving an inmate a piece of bread and much for dinner…inhumane. How in hell do you expect them to exit prison NOT angry and end up back in? Good god, people like you are idiots and don’t see the big picture.
As for my comment above, it might be good to know that I was a police officer as well.
Good for you, Sharlene. But I like ‘heartless and evil’ better than idiot.
Clearly Texas should move their prisoners to Minnesota during the summer.
Seriously this becomes a real point of contention. We do not IMHO owe prisoners COMFORT. We do owe them humane treatment. That includes housing conditions. I worked in the CA system for many years. We started having to make “accommodations” for prisoners who had heat sensitivity issues. This includes almost everybody on any kind of psych med. Pretty soon the inmates realized this and did whatever was necessary to get a script for some sort of psych med, so they got on the “heat med” list. They got to come in off the yard at their request when it got too hot. They had ice water distributed to them in the housing units. they got to shower more frequently than other prisoners, They got to be housed on lower tiers because it was cooler. It became a serious management issue with all the juggling necessary to accommodate them. In CA it is illegal to spend public money to air condition prisoners EXCEPT those in medical housing. A lot of inmates developed medical issues during the summer and at least CA is pretty much a dry heat, much more tolerable than hot and muggy. This is one of those things where you can legitimately be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And a lot of non-prisoners don’t have air conditioned homes. During July and August they are hot. Life is hard. And I don’t think you are heartless Howie.
I was born & raised in Texas. 48 years ago was just as hot as now. Most Christmas days in Houston Texas we wore shorts and went to the beach. Some parts of Texas are dry heat and some humid. Houston on a regular basis is 100% humidity but in East Texas its a dry heat – you get used to it either way.
I was a TDC Correctional Officer for 5 years in Dayton, Texas on 2nd shift (heat of the day). No, inmates do not deserve the comforts that MANY elderly law abiding Texans can’t afford. They already get to opt out of working in over 80 degrees and under 50 degrees while I’ve worked outside at 10 degrees and easily over 100 degrees on regular days. You drink lots of water. Yes you will sweat but that’s what you signed up for when you applied for the job and that’s what inmates signed up for when breaking the law.
No inmate should have a better living in prison than a law abiding tax paying citizen. By the way we also have high school kids that die in August practicing for sports/band/cheer and we have senior citizens that die because they can’t afford AC. Inmates take a backseat to them.
This is my kind of Howie Katz!
Donna it is not hotter now that it was 40 years ago. If you were here in 1980 we had 21 days straight that hit 100 degrees or higher. I know because I was framing houses that year. Guess what? none of us died from it.
When I was kid we lived in an unairconditioned house on Aspen St in Bellaire. When my little brother was being gestated my dad decided we needed a bigger house and to sell the one we were in the realtor told him to install a window unit. When he kicked that new fangled thing on me, my brothers and sisters all thought “Why move now!”.
My mom still remembers the time she visited the Texas State Fair in 1936 and watched the big thermometer hit 113. She said it was typical in Dallas summers to get reports of people dying from the heat and usually it was in traffic.
My hunch is those prisoners are much easier to handle when they are too hot to rumble.
The PEOPLE in prison are more apt to have fights, arguments and other unacceptable behavior when it’s hot. The temperature inside the cells is at lease 20 degrees over the exterior temperature. It is inhumance to force these PEOPLE to live in such conditions. Humanity…try it sometime.
Well said Mr. Katz! Particularly your tough shit ending! I grew up in the 60’s without central A/C. We did however have 1 large ac unit in the livingroom and another in mom and dad’s bedroom. At night, we would open all the doors inside the house so the air could circulate. As for inmates, I worked as a correction officer with TDCJ for over a decade at the Hightower Unit in Dayton, Tx. Not only did we have to deal with the heat and humidity, but also the God forsaken swamp mosquitos as the unit was built on top of a former rice field. Inmates have the ability to buy small personal fans from the commissary + they’er allowed to wear T-shirts and shorts in the ”dayroom” or their housing. Officers on the other hand had to wear short sleeve shirts with a T-shirt underneath, long uniform pants, and military type boots, while working in the same hot conditions that the inmates do. Some units do have air conditioning in the control pickets and we are allowed to switch out every few hours, but the old units do not. As Mr. Katz stated, inmates aren’t in there for petty offenses. I worked around rapists, child molesters, gang members and murderers. If they have to sweat through a life time of Texas summers, I say ”tough shit”!
It’s unbelievable how some of you think it is just fine to treat another human being less than that…..a human being. It’s a well know fact that INNOCENT people go to prison every day. Some are murdered, by the system. That’s okay by you?? However, prison in itself, IS the punishment. Being removed from society and your freedoms taken. Punishment IS NOT treating a human like a animal and society shield their face so they don’t have to acknowledge what is happening. 90% of prisoners WILL get out. Do you want a person who has some dignity and want to be able to move on with their life living next to you or someone who has been kicked around treated horrible and unable to adjust as your neighbor? Your child’s neighbor? Your grandchildren’s neighbor? If you can’t see the big picture then who do you really care about? Just your puffed up self behind a screen trying to make others angry….? Well congratulations.
Howie: A couple of late thoughts on this post.
First, people are sent to prison AS punishment, not FOR punishment. The punishment is loss of freedom. Many European countries have really nice prisons and much shorter sentences than we have. Yet, they have lower recividism rates because they train the inmate in saleable skills they can use when they are released.
As a defense attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, I spent a lot of time in a Dutch prison, a really old Dutch prison. Conditions were far better than in any US confinement facility I’ve ever been in.
Second, believe it or not, the Eighth Amendment cruel and unusual punishment gives inmates rights not enjoyed by non-confined citizens. For instance, deliberate indifference to medical needs is a constitutional violation. Just last week, there was a story in the Chronicle about treatment of inmates for Hepititis C. The Hep C drugs cost lots of money and lot of states have lost lawsuits for not providing treatment. Texas is trying to negotiate lower drug prices to be able to provide the treatment for Texas inmates. Citizens on the street with Hep C don’t get treatment unless they are rich or have health insurance.
All of this is because we’ve taken the inmates’ freedom away and we have to provide necessary food, housing and medical treatment for them because they can’t do it themselves.
Prison is the ultimate welfare state.
Third, and most important, the Texas prison officials lied to Judge Ellison. Rule 1 of being in litigation is you don’t lie to a federal judge. TDC agreed to keep certain prison units housing older and sick inmates at a certain level. Not only did they not comply with their agreement, they phonied up data and lied to the judge. They’re lucky he didn’t put them in their own prisons.
No one is suggesting that Texas prisons be kept at a balmy 75 degrees. But they are hot houses in the summer and inmates die of heat stroke. Sooner or later, Texas is going to end up air conditioning prisons to keep summer temperatures in the mid-80s.
Tom, my friend, and who is going to pay for all that air conditioning? It’s us, the law abiding citizens. We will be punished for the crimes committed by lawbreakers in that we will have to fork over our hard-earned dollars to keep the prison inmates comfortable … and they’ll be much more comfortable than law abiding citizens who do not have air conditioning. Thanks, but no thanks!
Howie: Sooner or later, probably sooner rather than later, a federal court is going to find that conditions in Texas prisons violate the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment. There are people dying every summer in Texas prisons from heat stroke. There are elderly inmates and inmates taking medications that make them more susceptible to heat stroke.
It costs lots of money to incarcerate someone in prison. That’s why the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation is lining up with liberal groups to reduce incarceration in ways ranging from bail reform to sentencing reform. In the 1980s, Texas blew off a chance to reform prison conditions, got popped badly in federal court and had to spend billions on new prisons.
Your position about inmates being more comfortable than law abiding people in Texas without air conditioning is a false equivalency. First, those law abiding citizens can go the mall to cool off and get a cold drink. Second, typically they have windows they can open. Third, there are comparatively few of them.
Inmates are locked up in small cells with no windows. They may have a small fan bought at the commissary but not much else to keep cool. And, the warden won’t let them to to the mall to cool down and get an ice tea.
We’re in a pay me now or pay me later situation.
Texas taxpayers are going to have to foot the tab to bring the temperatures in prisons into some sort of reasonable level, not 74 degrees but something reasonable. We’ll either do it voluntarily or a court will order us to do so. We’re better off planning and doing it ourselves.
And, if the federal courts find a general Eighth Amendment violation because of excessive heat, the courts are going to be flooded with civil rights suits by inmates or the relatives of inmates who died from heat stroke. That will get expensive fast.
And, it’s not just the inmates. There are staff working in those conditions. They deserve to work in conditions that don’t endanger their health.