People in prison struggle to survive unrelenting heat without air conditioning

JOHN YANG:

The extreme heat that scorching much of the country this summer is particularly brutal for prisoners and the guards who watch over them. By one count 44 states don't have air conditioning in all their prisons. 10 of those states are in the south with a heatwave has been unrelenting. In Mississippi, the Justice Department cited temperatures as high as 145 in the state penitentiary as among the conditions that violated prisoner's constitutional rights. After the Justice Department issued its findings last year, Mississippi began installing air conditioning. And in Texas, more than two-thirds of prisoner living areas lack air conditioning. We spoke with people who either have been inmates in Texas prisons or have family members who are currently in prison there to learn more about what it's like to live through extreme heat behind bars.

MARCI MARIE SIMMONS:

I spent over a decade in the Texas prison. I've been home for about two years.

NORMA BUENTROSTRO:

He's the youngest of my sons. He is serving a 15 year sentence in Texas.

JASON CRAWFORD:

I spent just over 14 years in the Texas Prison System.

BRITTANY POKORSKI:

I work in prison for a total of 11 years.

DELIA ANNMARIE:

I was incarcerated 17 years in Texas prisons.

BRITTANY POKORSKI:

I would say the heat was like being suffocated, like took your breath away.

MARCI MARIE SIMMONS:

That's very easy to kind of give into that a pressing need and almost frankly, forget to breathe.

JASON CRAWFORD:

I would be so hot that my vision would blur. I couldn't hear for some reason. I would flood the toilet. And I would lay in about an inch of cold running water with my band propped over me.

SAMANTHA WOODS:

My daughter has been there seven years. She has nine months to go. And she's sweating profusely all the time. Can't sleep. She works in the kitchen. So you know, it's like 120, 130 degrees in there and people or fainting people are seizing and falling on the floor.

MARCI MARIE SIMMONS:

Heat related seizures are very common in the summer months in prison. And I don't mean common like one a day. I mean common like three or four a day. I saw when I was incarcerated.

BRITTANY POKORSKI:

I had a really bad seizure. And I had hit my head really hard. And I still just couldn't I couldn't bring my temperature down. I was vomiting and diarrhea. I thought I was on die that day.

JASON CRAWFORD:

A guard had come in to sit with us. He passed out in the pot from being so hot and having that best and having the uniform on. He started to seize.

DELIA ANNMARIE:

We had one inmate pass away from a heat stroke, because they were not allowing us to have our fans.

SAMANTHA WOODS:

There's mediocre air-conditioning, so as an opportunity when I visit her that she can actually be in semi-air conditioning for two hours.

NORMA BUENTROSTRO:

In a metal building, you're talking about maybe 120, 130 degrees or even higher, is inhumane. I — my heart aches when I see him connect to him. Because it is — I can't. I can't help him.

JOHN YANG:

Earlier this year, an effort to include money for prison air-conditioning and the next budget in Texas failed in the State Senate. Maurice Chammah writes for the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on the criminal justice system. Maurice, I know you took a deep dive into this topic. You did a documentary with the Weather Channel about it a few years back. You've talked to a lot of people around the country, you've talked to a lot of people in Texas, is what we just heard unusual compared to what you heard from others.

MAURICE CHAMMAH, The Marshall Project:

No, it's very in line with what is happening in prisons across the south. You get reports from incarcerated people that it is just an elemental struggle to survive and that increasing number just don't make it. So there was an epidemiological study in Texas that found that about 14 deaths a year could be attributed to the higher heat. Often it is hard to pinpoint that a particular death is because of the heat. Sometimes it scans as a heart attack or stroke. But we know that frequently, the underlying cause this sort of strain on the body that led to some of these deaths comes from that summer heat.

JOHN YANG:

We reached out to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and they provided us a statement from their director of communications says in part, much like those Texans who do not have access to air conditioning in their homes, the department uses an array of measures to keep inmates safe. The agency recognizes that some inmates are potentially at a heightened risk of heat related illnesses because of their age, health conditions or medications. These individuals are identified through an automated heat sensitivity score that uses information from the inmates electronic health record. Individuals who have a heat sensitivity score, receive priority placement in a housing area that is air conditioned. So there they're talking about prisoner's health conditions, but you also say that a growing segment of the population is becoming more sensitive to heat.

MAURICE CHAMMAH:

Well, I should say that many of those measures the Texas prison system took were only in response to lawsuits that were brought by prisoners and their families after a wave of deaths and other medical issues. There are a number of prisoners who are especially susceptible to summer heat, you know, we pass laws in the 80s and 90s, that sent more and more people to prison for longer and longer sentences. And that means that we're dealing with the reality of people in their 60s and 70s, who just have less of a physical ability, just like 16, 17-year olds in the free world to really deal with the heat on in the hottest months. And then on top of that you have a lot of prisoners who are suffering from mental illnesses. And we know that psychotropic drugs sort of depresses the body's ability to deal with heat. So you've got a heat index of 120, 130 degrees in there, people desperately go off their psychotropic medications, and that can make them more dangerous to other prisoners or the staff. You see a rise in suicides. And then you also just see more and more corrections officers either take off work because they've had some kind of heat related illness, or just quit or not take the job in the first place. JOHN YANG: Why are there so many prisons without air conditioning?

MAURICE CHAMMAH:

I think the issue is essentially political there. Since the 1970s. And 80s. There was this understanding that you know, many Americans don't have air conditioning. But what I think policymakers and the public didn't realize is that even anyone outside of prison can go outside and catch a breeze, they have more access to water, they're not literally living day to day, hour by hour in these cells of buildings made out of stone and concrete that are really heating up like ovens, much more so than even your typical house.

JOHN YANG:

What does this say about how we treat prisoners in the United States?

MAURICE CHAMMAH:

Well, it says that we're still tremendously unsympathetic to them. I mean, there's been a lot of talk of criminal justice reform over the last 5, 10 years. But you still see, not just in southern states, but certainly in them. There is a — an idea still that prisoners are sort of the castaways of society who have put themselves there, even though we know that, you know, many people are wrongfully convicted or are sentenced to really, really long sentences for I think what most people would consider fairly low level crimes. This lack of sympathy and mercy, I think, is still very much with us from the 1980s and 90s. And I think you see it in this continuing unwillingness among policymakers to install air conditioning and reduce the likelihood that prisoners are going to have strokes and even die each summer.

JOHN YANG:

As we've said, this also affects corrections officers and other people who work in these prisons, it actually becomes sort of a labor issue or workplace conditions issue. Are states and prisons more receptive to them than they are to prisoners?

MAURICE CHAMMAH:

I mean, in theory, but Texas right still does not have air conditioning, even though many corrections officers have been asking for it. And even though they have said that the shortage of guards, the inability of the state to hire people to work in prisons is partially attributable just to the fact that people don't want to spend their work day in these conditions if they can avoid it. Part of that is that they don't want to live through the heat, but part of it is also the corrections officers don't want to live with the increased levels of violence of suicide and other problems that are in a prison during these hottest summer months.

JOHN YANG:

Maurice Chammah of the Marshall Project. Thank you very much.

MAURICE CHAMMAH:

Thanks for having me.