In the summer of 2023, 65-year-old Bernie Tiede, the former mortician serving a life sentence for a murder that inspired Richard Linklater’s dark comedy “Bernie,” suffered a stroke. He was housed in a cell without air conditioning in a Texas prison. With the assistance of several high-profile celebrities, including Linklater and Matthew McConaughey, Tiede filed a civil rights lawsuit demanding air conditioning for everyone incarcerated in the Texas prison system. Over 21 other incarcerated individuals and several criminal justice reform groups joined the litigation.
On Tuesday, their efforts paid off.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ordered Texas prison officials to “immediately create and implement a plan” that would provide air conditioning to the entire incarcerated population by the end of 2029.
I watched numerous men pass out in the common areas, the dining hall, or inside their cells from heat-related illnesses. Some even died.
For those who have endured more severe heat waves and other extreme weather, climate change may have only recently evolved from an abstract concern into a full-fledged crisis that directly impacts them.
But for those incarcerated inside of the nation’s prisons and detention centers, extreme weather has been a crippling health emergency for decades.
Hundreds of thousands of incarcerated individuals are literally being cooked to death inside carceral facilities across the U.S. that largely operate without universal air conditioning.
Incarcerated people in southern states like Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida have been the most vulnerable.
For almost three decades, I have watched each notoriously hot Texas summer become more unbearable and deadly than the last for the nearly 140,000 men and women held inside of the state’s prison system — including myself.
I entered a Texas prison on a sweltering August afternoon in 1999.
To combat the heat, other incarcerated individuals showed me how to soak my clothing in water before leaving my cell. The wet clothes provided a slight reprieve from the heat. Whenever I was in the cell, my cellmate and I had to flood our floor with water and lie side by side wearing only boxer shorts to survive. There was no cold water, no respite areas, and no cool showers permitted.
In complete shock, I watched numerous men pass out in the common areas, the dining hall, or inside their cells from heat-related illnesses. Some even died. Texas does offer summer uniforms for the prison population – t-shirts and shorts, made with prison labor – but the incarcerated people who make them need to buy them if they want to wear them. Otherwise they’re stuck with thick, hot, standard-issue uniforms.
According to a study by researchers at Brown, Boston, and Harvard universities, at least 271 people died from heat-related causes inside of Texas prisons from 2001 to 2019. Ten of those people died in the 2011 heat wave alone.
Providing air conditioning to incarcerated people has long been viewed as being soft on crime. Despite the inherent harms of extreme heat, Texas Republicans, led by Greg Abbott, who staunchly defended Texas prison officials in heat-related lawsuits as attorney general, have failed to hold prison officials accountable. It is a trend Abbott has maintained as the state’s governor by overseeing a legislative agenda where heat-relief bills die along with those inside the state’s prisons.
People like Jace Coones. Coones was incarcerated at the Wallace Unit, a state prison facility in the West Texas town of Colorado City. In the middle of an extreme heat wave during the summer of 2020, Coones started complaining to medical staff. There were no fans, ice water, or daily showers for Coones to combat the 100-plus degree temperatures.
According to a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Coones’ family, medical staff at the prison sent Coones back to his overheated cell despite clear signs that he was suffering from dehydration. Three days later, he was found dead inside his cell next to four untouched food trays. He had lost 24 pounds over that span of 72 hours.
It’s not just the South. As climate change has created hotter and more frequent heat waves across the nation, incarcerated individuals in states as far north as New Jersey and Illinois are beginning to feel the heat. Numerous heat-related lawsuits have been filed by incarcerated individuals asserting the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment.
Data collected by The Intercept in 2020 revealed that more than a third of the detention facilities in the country have historically had more than 50 days a year, on an average, with a heat index above 90 degrees.
The National Weather Service’s protocols suggest a heat index over 90 degrees merits “extreme caution.” Anything over 105 is considered dangerous.
While incarcerated individuals have constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment, meeting the legal standards for such claims is often impossible given that federal courts have long held that the U.S. Constitution does not mandate comfortable prisons. While prison officials must provide humane conditions of confinement, including “adequate shelter,” there is no clear legal definition of “adequate shelter” except that it must not deny the “minimal civilized measures of life’s necessities.”
Despite those ambiguities, there have been tiny successes over the years in the fight for air conditioning in Texas prisons.
“It’s a shame that this country has federal laws to protect animals from extreme heat, but not humans.”
Alvaro Hernandez
In 2013, a group of incarcerated men who were suffering from medical complications that are exacerbated by extreme heat — like diabetes, hypertension, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — filed a lawsuit. Their suit ended with a settlement in 2018 that mandated the prison agency install air conditioning at their geriatric facility located northwest of Houston.
This one facility was not large enough to house the other roughly 52,000 incarcerated individuals with disabilities who, according to the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities, are in the state’s prisons.
Prison officials tried to ease concerns that same year by incorporating new heat mitigation protocols into agency policies. During the excessive-heat months — May to October — incarcerated individuals were provided water, ice, and additional showers; were granted authorization to wear seasonal clothing like gym shorts and T-shirts; and could purchase cooling items like fans and cool towels from the prison’s commissary.
These mitigation efforts proved to be inefficient and ineffective, as record-setting heat indexes have swept the nation for the past six years straight. And in Texas as elsewhere, Incarcerated people continued to report rampant experiences with heat-related illness and death.
Currently, the prison agency has only 53,676 air conditioned beds, according to the Texas Tribune. There are plans in place to add another 7,000 by the end of the year, which still leaves roughly 80,000 incarcerated people without.
“That’s a nice ruling,” Alvaro Hernandez, a jailhouse lawyer who has been incarcerated in Texas for the past 30 years, told me skeptically. “Let’s see if that ruling survives the 5th Circuit or if Texas actually follows it.”
Hernandez has watched several favorable rulings handed down by U.S. district judges get overturned by the conservative judges at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“It’s a shame that this country has federal laws to protect animals from extreme heat, but not humans,” Hernandez said, referring to the federal mandates that require animal shelters to keep temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees for safety reasons.
This week’s victory overall gives incarcerated people, especially those with acute health issues, hope that better summers are on the horizon. But there’s still a ways to go.
Providing air conditioning for incarcerated people might not reverse climate change trends like transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable wind energy would. It can, however, start a new pattern of more humane treatment for one of the country’s most marginalized populations.
At least in the state of Texas, air conditioning is no longer a luxury; it is a human right.
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