A majority of Texas prisons have no air conditioning and no plans are in place to deal with global heating trends

Rodney Adams had a job hauling luggage for airlines before bereavements and a back injury took their toll and he was convicted of drink driving in 2012. Just two days after his arrival at the Gurney unit in eastern Texas, Adams had a seizure and collapsed in the August heat. His body temperature was nearly 110F (43.3C).

His daughter, Ashley Frantom, was 38 weeks pregnant and slumbering when the call came from a prison chaplain to inform her that Adams was in hospital.

Frantom drove three hours in the middle of the night to find her father shackled to a hospital bed. “We stayed in the hospital all night and then had to make the call in the morning to take him off life support,” she said. “I don’t think prisoners are treated like humans in this state. If there was air conditioning in that prison, my dad would be alive, out of jail and rebuilding his life right now.”

Adams’s autopsy found he died of hyperthermia – excessive body temperature – one of at least 23 prisoners to die in Texas this way since 1998. Prisons that bake dangerously in the heat are dotted across the American south but are now found even in cooler states such as Wisconsin, with experts warning that inmates face increasingly deadly risks as global temperatures rise.

‘A lot of people are in danger’

“If you think about climate change the prison population probably doesn’t come to mind but things can get out of hand quickly in summertime,” said Daniel Holt, an academic at Columbia University. Holt authored a 2015 paper that found widespread risk of heat-related illnesses among the 2.2 million people imprisoned in the US, due to advanced age, mental health problems and complicating medications.

“If it gets too hot I can put on the air conditioning or go to the movies. In prison you can’t take as good care of yourself other than ask for water and ice. A lot of people are in danger.”

Texas’s punishing heat is only set to worsen. Prisoners in the state already have to deal with temperatures of more than 100F in the summer, with human-driven climate breakdown set to push up the average temperature by as much as 5F within 30 years. This will multiply days of scorching heat that imperils lives, with a Texas department of criminal justice spokesman confirming the prison system has no plan to cope with global heating trends.

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Efforts to alleviate the overheating of prisons in Texas were recently stymied by state lawmakers. A proposed bill would have set an upper temperature limit of 85F in Texas prisons, only to be gutted in favour of a study to assess the costs of keeping temperatures bearable.

The watering-down of the bill was attacked by families of people who have died in overheated prisons and their advocates. Texas lawmakers simply resorted to a “cop-out”, according to Casey Phillips, president and co-founder of Texas Prisons Air-Conditioning Advocates.

Currently, 75 out of 104 state-run prisons in Texas do not have air conditioning and the TDCJ has said it would need to spend $1.2bn to remedy this situation.

“I was hoping we could resolve this but there is concern about cost and there’s a lack of compassion for people classified as criminals,” said Carl Sherman, a state representative who co-sponsored the bill to limit prison heat.

“When you see facilities with little or no ventilation it makes me very, very concerned. We will likely face more days with temperatures over 100 degrees in the future and we have to do better. We should be administering humanity but we are lacking.”

There are more than 140,000 people in Texas prisons, many of them in ageing facilities not designed for the comfort of inmates during brutally hot days. TDCJ instigates measures such as cold showers, chilled drinking water and reduced work duty when the heat index reaches 95F but many prisoners complain the conditions remain intolerable.

‘Like living inside a hot-box’

“When it’s hot inside these institutions it’s like living inside a hot-box or oven in the middle of summer,” Elliott Williams, imprisoned over a series of robberies for the past 31 years, wrote in a letter to the Guardian. Williams is incarcerated in the Michael unit, located about 100 miles south-east of Dallas.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elliott Williams’ letter to the Guardian. Photograph: The Guardian

Williams wrote that on hotter nights he will soak himself with water and sleep on the floor, although the fans in the prison do little but push around warm air. “They will place one large floor fan in your area that does nothing, when dealing with the Texas prison system, it’s all showmenship [sic],” he wrote.

“My own personal belief is that some of these prison [sic] need to be torn-down, and done away with, they present a risk to inmates and officers alike, when a guard is working under poor conditions he’s going to make your life and time a living hell.”

I don’t have love for these people … [but] the incarceration is their punishment, not cooking them to death.

Prison guards have reported that suicide attempts among prisoners rise during the hotter summer months. “I don’t have love for these people,” said Lance Lowry, who heads the state prison guards union, in reference to inmates, “[but] the incarceration is their punishment, not cooking them to death.”

In 2017, Williams launched an attempt to sue the state over medical and heat-related conditions, one of several lawsuits aimed at the Texas prison system following a spate of deaths.

A total of 10 inmates died in a 2011 heatwave, with four perishing in high temperatures a year later. Last year, Robert Earl Robinson, 54, died on 19 July at the Michael unit in east Texas from “environmental hyperthermia”, commonly known as heatstroke, according to an in-custody death report. The prison system disputes this cause of death, however, stating that an autopsy didn’t back this finding.

Inmates achieved a breakthrough after filing a lawsuit against the Wallace Pack prison in 2014, claiming that they routinely experienced weakness, dizziness and nausea due to extreme heat. Three years later, a federal judge ruled that these sweltering conditions were unconstitutional for medically vulnerable inmates.

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More than 1,000 at-risk prisoners, such as the elderly and those with heart conditions were moved to air-conditioned facilities, although some complained they were forced to agree to a measurement of core body temperature via rectal thermometer before they were allowed to go to these cooler areas. A more sweeping solution was agreed in a settlement last February, when TDCJ agreed to install air conditioning throughout the Wallace Pack prison.

About 70% of Texas’s prison population remains without air conditioning, however, a situation that current and former inmates say endangers even healthier members of the incarcerated population.

‘Even animal shelters get air conditioning’

Jose Flores spent 14 years in Texas prisons on a variety of burglary and substance-related charges before being paroled in 2012. Flores said he would typically be made to work outside in 100F heat, picking vegetables while being berated by guards, before being given a warm shower. TDCJ has said it now has new processes to avoid situations like this.

“I’d be in a cell for 23 hours a day and it was so hot in there I would put my hand to the wall and it would get burned,” said Flores, who now works for the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition.

“There was no ventilation system so my cellmate and me would take turns sleeping on the floor. You’d clean the floor, throw water down so it was like a puddle and lie down on it on a sheet. Everything would be completely dry in the morning. The summers were just miserable.”

Flores said the irritation of the heat caused prisoners to fight each other, with some previously healthy inmates becoming sick. “It’s sad because we are talking about human beings,” he said. “Even dogs and cats in animal shelters get air conditioning.”

As the US heats up, prisoners even beyond the stifling south are increasingly finding themselves on the frontline of the climate crisis.

Increasingly powerful storms and disastrous flooding events spurred by the climate crisis are also set to disproportionally affect prisoners who are routinely left in harm’s way.

Last year, a million people were evacuated from the Carolinas when Hurricane Florence crunched into the coast, leaving behind several thousand prisoners who tasked with heaping sand into bags.

A year previously, as Hurricane Harvey inundated parts of Texas, prisoners were locked inside their cells with limited access to water and power. Some lost access to medication, others reported floodwater seeping into their prisons.

Andrea Hasberry, the girlfriend of an inmate at the Beaumont prison, posted on Facebook a series of his messages which outlined the lack of water and sanitation in the building. “We hot and sweaty and can’t take no shower,” he wrote. “I’m dying over here man.”