A lawsuit filed by a cohort of Texas prison-rights advocates against the executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice accuses the department of creating inhumane conditions inside Texas prisons by failing to air condition the facilities. The lawsuit opens by saying “Texas prisoners are being cooked to death. Last summer alone, many people died and hundreds more suffered serious heat-related illnesses because of the sweltering temperatures in Texas’s prisons.”
A Guardian article describes the lawsuit this way:
“The legal action aims to force the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) to air condition all its prisons, about two-thirds of which currently lack AC. As a result, about 85,000 prisoners across dozens of correctional institutions are estimated to be at risk of heat stroke, exhaustion, nausea and other heat-related conditions, even to the point of death.”
Reading about the conditions in Texas prisons reminded me of John Wesley’s advocacy for prisoners in the eighteenth century.
John Wesley, the Anglican minister who started the Methodist movement, taught that works of mercy are a way a person can deepen their faith and grow closer to God. One of Wesley’s most fundamental works of mercy was to visit and minister to people being held in prisons.
After observing inhumane conditions in one prison during a visit, he rallied his followers together to provide appropriate clothing, better bedding, and other improvements for the prisoners. Wesley’s example is the foundation of contemporary prison ministries, in which people of faith visit prisons to talk to inmates, provide spiritual care, and offer other acts of mercy.
Wesley’s work with incarcerated people was top of mind as I read a Texas Observer article written by Cesar Hernandez, an inmate at a Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison.
Hernandez’s piece describes the way some Texas prisons interpret the legal requirement that prisoners should have access to air conditioning, requiring prisoners to wait in unairconditioned spaces, to attend classes or religious services, or do other unrelated tasks to access air conditioning. Inmates must continue to do assigned work, like laundry and cleaning, even as temperatures rise to unsafe levels inside. And prisoners sometimes have to wait hours to be given access to water.
Prisons are built for security, not ventilation, and during intense heat, the temperature inside can exceed a hundred degrees for days or weeks. A Texas Tribune article describes attempts by prisoners to stay cool during the summer months, including flooding toilets to access water and starting fires so that guards will spray firehoses into the cell.
Texas has always been hot, but in recent decades the number of days where the temperature exceeds a hundred degrees has risen. The Office of the State Climatologist projects that hundred degree days will occur four times as often in 2036 as they did in the 1970s and 1980s.
Prolonged exposure to extreme heat is risky for all of the systems in the human body. It stresses your cardiovascular system and your kidneys and even mental health. Experts report increases in mental health calls at emergency rooms and incidence of violence, self-harm, and domestic violence during prolonged periods of extreme heat.
Growing awareness of the danger of extreme heat prompted the Biden administration to put together a National Heat Strategy designed to prepare for and respond to extreme heat, especially in areas that do not have experience with high temperatures.
Given the rise in extreme heat in Texas and the effects we know extreme heat has on people, why do we continue to incarcerate people in unairconditioned prisons?
The TDCJ lawsuit characterizes the conditions in Texas prisons as a human rights issue:
“Texas’s torturous heat conditions have been consistently cited as cruel and unusual punishment by multiple human rights organizations, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Congress, the Texas Legislature, correctional staff, doctors, and courts. Despite this, and despite knowing that thousands of peoples’ lives are once again at stake as summer approaches, TDCJ has done nothing to lower the temperatures inside the majority of its prisons’ housing areas. Instead, TDCJ continues to rely on its constitutionally inadequate policy that it demonstrably knows cannot mitigate the heat.”
TDCJ has said that the issue with air conditioning the 70% of Texas prisons that do not have air conditioning is a matter of funding. Advocates point to the multi-billion dollar surplus Texas reported last year and ask why some of that cannot be used to address this problem.
The lack of action despite the availability of funds suggests that the issue is a matter of political will, rather than accounting. Improving conditions for people convicted of crimes is not a sympathetic campaign issue. But as the lawsuit points out, the goal is simply to make prisons a safe and humane place to live.
“We’re not trying to make this lush, we’re trying to make it humane. These are third world conditions. We’re supposed to run prisons, not concentration camps. These are institutions for incarceration. The incarceration is their punishment. Not cooking them to death.”
As people of faith who recognize the sacred worth of each person, regardless of the things they have done in the past, we can take our lead from John Wesley, who believed firmly in the power of God’s grace to reform human hearts and advocate for the humane and safe treatment of Texas prisoners.