Most states have no maximum temperature standards for their prisons: combine that with a succession of hottest-months-on-record and a prison system that provides less water than is medically recommended even when it’s not hotter than blazes, and you’ve got a carceral state that is roasting prisoners alive.
Of course, it’s worse in Texas, where there’s little sympathy for prisoners from the free population, who are prone to viewing prison as a punishment rather than a rehabilitation process. At the Price Daniel Unit, temperatures reach 140′ and prisoners are given one 8oz cup of warm water every four hours — half the National Academy of Medicine recommendation for adults under normal temperatures.
At least 14 prisoners have died of heat in Texas prisons since 2007 — a certain undercount, and a circumstance blamed on Texas authorities “reckless indifference,” according to reports from University of Texas School of Law’s Human Rights Clinic (the clinic believe that the true count is more in the “several dozens” range, and they are working to get more data out of the prison system).
Earlier this summer, a federal judge certified a class action after inmates at another Texas prison — the Wallace Pack Unit, which houses sick, disabled, and elderly prisoners serving time for nonviolent crimes — sued TDCJ officials in an effort to keep the temperature below 88 degrees and prevent heat-stroke deaths. Plaintiffs in that case, originally filed in 2014, described sleeping on the floor to get some relief from the heat, metal walls trapping heat “like a parked car,” and metal tables that “get so heated that prisoners have to lay towels on them to rest their elbows on.”Fred Wallace, a 72-year old plaintiff who is clinically obese and suffers from high blood pressure, said in a statement read by his lawyer that one day he felt he was going to pass out from the heat and asked a guard if he could go to the prison’s barber shop, a cooler area. He was denied permission.
“I felt so sick that I sat down on the floor,” he said in his testimony. “Only when the guard returned 15 minutes later and said, ‘You look like you’re going to die’ did he allow me to enter the barber shop.”
“DEADLY HEAT” IN U.S. PRISONS IS KILLING INMATES AND SPAWNING LAWSUITS [Alice Speri/The Intercept]