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Americans across the country are suffering from extreme heat this summer. But there’s a group of people that may be facing even higher temperatures: prisoners. In Texas alone, reports indicate at least nine inmates have died of heart attacks or unknown causes in the prisons without air conditioning. So far, the state hasn’t classified any of the deaths as heat-related. But a study by researchers at Brown, Boston and Harvard Universities found that 13%, or 271, of the deaths that happened in Texas prisons without universal air conditioning between 2001 and 2019 “may be attributable to extreme heat days.”
Straight Arrow News contributor Adrienne Lawrence believes Texas hasn’t labeled any of these deaths as heat-related because it is afraid of a barrage of wrongful death lawsuits.
Many prisons across the hot south, from Alabama to Mississippi, lack cooling systems. And these human beings are boiling; not to mention that it’s not just adults that are suffering, it’s kids, too. In Louisiana, where the heat indexes topped 133 degrees this month, children incarcerated at the Angola prison say that they are locked in windowless cells with no air conditioning for nearly 24 hours a day. These conditions were known to administrators. And these temperatures, they were predicted by scientists, and this treatment is beyond inhumane.
Whether they’re adults or children, inmates belong to the state. The state is charged with caring for them until they finish paying their debts to society. No matter the offense that they committed, our society is not supposed to be the one backing torture. To house individuals in temperatures north of 130 degrees is just that — torture. The stories of inmates drenching their bedding in their latrine so that they can cool themselves, collapsing from excess heat, going into cardiac arrest and so much more — it should be jarring, if not disturbing to all.
Yet somehow we have absolutely no problem whatsoever allowing individuals to suffer simply because they have violated our rules. That’s not how humanity is supposed to work as far as I’m concerned. And it’s also not how democracy is supposed to work. We’ve committed to protecting individuals from cruel and unusual punishment. Since at least the Attica uprising of 1971, our courts have built a body of case law that commands our carceral system treat individuals with dignity and keep them in good health.
