From The Texas Newsroom:
Texas prisons without air conditioning get so hot in summer that temperatures there would routinely violate state standards for other types of lockups, like county jails, according to a new comprehensive analysis of four years of heat data.
The Texas Newsroom and data fellows in the Media Innovation Group at the University of Texas at Austin spent more than a year analyzing temperature readings taken at dozens of state prisons that lack AC. The analysis showed all but one of these state-run lockups reached 85 degrees — the top temperature allowed inside county jails — at some point in each of the last four years, with most prisons consistently hitting 90 degrees and some topping 100.
The reporting also found that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is no longer keeping records of what days certain emergency safeguards are triggered during heat waves.
The agency is being sued over the lack of AC in its prisons and will defend itself in a federal trial next month. The plaintiffs, which include advocacy organizations and incarcerated people, want AC installed in all prisons, arguing the current heat levels amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice rejects the premise that conditions inside Texas prisons are unconstitutional. In court, prison officials have defended their heat mitigation policy and said they need time and additional state funding to install more AC.
The spokesperson for the prison agency said the policy was recently updated with an eye toward safety and transparency, and that special teams are being dispatched to ensure it is followed.
“All changes made in policy were driven with the intent to improve implementation and accountability — not shy away from it,” Amanda Hernandez told The Texas Newsroom.
The state of Texas operates 103 prison facilities, and 66 do not have full air conditioning inside housing areas like cell blocks and dorms. This means that most of the roughly 141,000 people incarcerated in state-run lockups live in units without full AC.
Erica Grossman, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said the Texas prison agency is covering up the true toll of the heat.
“There is no mitigation measure other than air conditioning that can protect people from death or sickness due to the heat,” Grossman said. “People living in Texas prisons should not be subjected to conditions we won’t even subject animals to.”
Prisons regularly top 90 degrees
Texas has heat rules for county jails and animal shelters. But there are no similar safety standards in state law for Texas prisons. Just 37 units are fully air conditioned, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and 52 have partial AC.
After years of questions about how hot it truly gets inside these buildings, state lawmakers in 2021 began requiring prison staff to record temperatures inside unair-conditioned prisons. The readings are taken indoors once daily from April to September.
The Texas Newsroom and data fellows analyzed four years of this data using 85 degrees as a key safety measurement.
The analysis found that all but one unair-conditioned prison reached 85 degrees at least once in the past four summers. The Walker Sayle Unit, a substance abuse facility for men near Abilene, only avoided reaching this temperature by less than half a degree — readings there topped 84.6 degrees twice in summer 2022, the last time this prison was included in state data.
In fact, climbing above 85 degrees proved to be the norm rather than the outlier. The data showed it was this hot about half the time across all the unair-conditioned units from April to September in the past four years, and that it reached 90 degrees at least a quarter of the time from 2022-2024. Last summer, which was comparatively mild, temperatures reached 90 degrees about one in every five days across the system.
Some prisons saw consistently higher temperatures than this. In three of the past four years, at least a dozen units reached 100 degrees inside at least once, the data showed.
One of these was Lucile Plane State Jail, a women’s unit off I-90 between Houston and Beaumont. More days than not, it was over 95 degrees. Eight times in 2023, the temperatures inside Plane State Jail tipped into triple digits, the data showed.
Crystal Gayle Frank has spent years in the Texas prison system. She said the stretch she was incarcerated at Plane State Jail in summer 2024 was the hardest time she’s ever done. With one cooler for her dorm of 58 women, Frank said the water would be gone before everyone got a drink. The only times she remembered getting real relief was when she got to work in the law library, which had AC.
Even standing in line for her daily medication was difficult, Frank said. They had to wait outside, she explained, and the heat would get to her.
“I watched people fall out, pass out, and seize so many times but were afraid to go to medical because of how they would treat them,” she wrote to The Texas Newsroom.
Frank said sometimes people would pass out in bed and wouldn’t be found until hours later. She wrote: “It honestly blows my mind and breaks my heart at the injustice of the justice system.”
The Garza West Unit, a men’s facility about an hour from Corpus Christi, routinely had the highest indoor heat readings of any state prison. Last summer, temperatures hit 85 degrees nearly every day. During the 2023 heat wave, there were more than 100 days where it reached 95 degrees inside. The heat tipped into triple digits a quarter of the time that year.
Plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit allege the heat behind bars has contributed to the deaths of several incarcerated people in recent years, including at least three during the heat wave in 2023.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has acknowledged one likely heat death in recent years, a 44-year-old man who collapsed while playing soccer at a prison in Huntsville in 2024.
