‘Cooking someone to death’: Southern states resist calls to add air conditioning to prisons

Temperatures inside some prison cells in the South routinely exceed 120 degrees in the summer months. Inmates in these facilities often resort to drinking toilet water to cool off. In Texas alone, at least 14 prison deaths per year can be attributed to extreme heat.

Of course, there’s an easy — if costly — solution: installing air conditioning. But politicians across the conservative South have repeatedly balked at forking over tens of millions of dollars to improve conditions for a population that garners little public sympathy from their constituents. Recent efforts in both Texas and Florida to allocate major funding to address the issue have sputtered due to resistance from lawmakers.

The end result: The vast majority of facilities remain without AC in many states. Roughly three-quarters of Florida prisons lack AC, according to Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Ricky Dixon. Over two-thirds of Texas prison beds don’t have air conditioning throughout the facilities as of 2024, with many prisons in Georgia and Alabama also without complete air conditioning.

Both inmates and prison guards say the sweltering conditions are not only inhumane, but make the facilities much more dangerous for everyone.

“Men and women who are incarcerated in these situations where their bodies are hot, they can’t get cooled down — they get frustrated,” said Eddie Fordham, who spent three decades in Florida prisons after being convicted of first-degree murder as an 18-year-old, in an interview. “They get mad at themselves and each other. The officers get mad at themselves and each other.”

The conditions are likely to get more turbulent as temperatures steadily rise.

“We hear a lot of people say that: ‘If they couldn’t do the time, they shouldn’t have done the crime,’” said Arizona state Rep. Analise Ortiz, a Democrat who served on the state’s Independent Prison Oversight Commission and has advocated for adding air conditioning to facilities. “That mentality is really frustrating for me. It’s very counterproductive … that some of my colleagues do not see this as a priority.”

Texas, in particular, has been at the center of a conflict surrounding air conditioning for state inmates. A recent budget that would have provided $545 million for Texas prison cooling, drafted by the state’s House of Representatives, was killed by the Senate.

The Texas budget ultimately set aside $85.7 million over the next two fiscal years for “deferred maintenance” that includes AC and other upgrades like roof repairs, security fencing and wastewater improvements, alongside an additional $89 million for major repairs, the Texas Tribune reported . But put together, the money is still a third of the amount the House would’ve set aside for AC specifically.

An inmate named Bernhardt Tiede II filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice last summer after suffering what was most likely a stroke due to heat, according to the complaint . The lawsuit references inmates drinking toilet water to cool off and temperatures exceeding 120 degrees inside prisons.

“If cooking someone to death does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment, then nothing does,” the complaint states.

A hearing is scheduled for June 27 to consider a pair of pending motions. The state is seeking to have the case dismissed, while Tiede is asking for a preliminary injunction forcing Texas to maintain temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees in prisons.

Florida’s prisons face problems that go far beyond a lack of air conditioning. Of the nearly six dozen correctional facilities and annexes, a third of them were built in the 1980s and 1990s with few consistent updates, according to a 2019 report from the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability. The state Legislature hired consulting firm KPMG in 2022 to assess the viability of the prisons and create a 20-year plan for updates. In all three options KPMG proposed, the state would have to spend upwards of $5 billion to build new facilities and renovate old ones. Within that multibillion-dollar budget, consultants pressed for $582 million to install air conditioning in all of the prisons.

This was met with pushback from Republican state Sen. Jonathan Martin, who instead proposed directing the half a billion into boosting correctional officer salaries to increase retention. Martin said he wasn’t aware of any health or safety issues within the prison system when it came to AC.

“What was the impetus for the air conditioning? It’s a lot of money,” he said during a November meeting with the consultants. “Is it worth the investment, if there’s literally been zero injuries, zero deaths in Florida?”

The final KPMG proposal still provides the $582 million “modernization” option of adding AC, and it directly lists $7.6 million for a new HVAC system at one site as an "immediate capital maintenance" need. Lawmakers have earmarked $100 million for maintenance and repairs in prisons , but no money specifically for AC. (Martin declined to comment for this story.)

Some hot states have made progress in addressing the issue. After a $30 million plan was approved by the North Carolina lawmakers, the state has begun installing air conditioning throughout the prison system. About two-thirds of inmate beds currently have AC, according to the state’s Department of Adult Correction . And 40 of the state’s 53 prisons are slated to get AC upgrades, which are expected to finish by 2026.

And Arizona lawmakers have already set a plan in motion to upgrade all of its prisons to full AC. Currently, the majority of them have swamp coolers, which are portable machines that pass air over water pads to cool it down, and they break down often in the Arizona summers.

Ortiz, who was elected in 2022, said the state Department of Corrections told her that all prisons should have air conditioning by the end of the year, though the department’s plan outlines some buildings waiting until 2026 for improvements . (The Department of Corrections did not respond to a request for comment.)

But efforts to allocate funds for the prison upgrades sparked criticism. Ortiz says some Arizona legislators opposed the change in order to bolster their “tough on crime” credentials.

“It’s deeply concerning to me,” Ortiz said. “When somebody is sentenced to prison, their punishment is the fact that they’re being removed by society and isolated to serve out the sentence — not to be tortured in a prison cell with 115 to 120 degree temperatures.”

Prison advocates say that callous disregard for the treatment of inmates is shortsighted both in terms of finances and public safety. Michele Deitch, director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Prison and Jail Innovation Lab, said extreme heat exacerbates already existing problems in prisons. Heat-triggered violence, for example, can endanger both corrections officers and inmates — and an array of psychotropic medications can make inmates especially heat-sensitive.

“There are certainly members of the public that believe that people who are incarcerated deserve whatever they get,” she said. “They don’t really care what happens to people who are inside. We don’t have a money problem, we have a give a damn problem.”

Fordham, the former Florida inmate who was released on parole in 2022, knows firsthand how the lack of AC can cause desperation inside prisons. From Jacksonville to the Everglades, he said all of the facilities he lived in had no air conditioning — and that is still the case today.

Inmates would lay on the ground to cool off when prison guards weren’t watching, Fordham recalled, since they aren’t allowed to be on the floor. They’d seek out air conditioned chapels to take naps in the pews to get relief. They would also wear rags around their necks to wipe the sweat from their faces. By the end of the day, you could wring out a bottle’s worth of water from them, Fordham said.

Some correctional employees have also agitated for change. Mark Caruso, a former officer of 10 years with the Department of Corrections, said working during the summer months without air conditioning can make it hard to think, which in turn can make the work dangerous.

“In the dorm, they’re all on top of each other, they’re agitated,” he said. “We have to deal with it when they’re uncomfortable, when they’re fighting and they’re hot.”

Turnover for correctional officers in Florida was 28 percent during the 2021-2022 fiscal year, according to the KPMG report . Caruso said a number of factors contribute to that, like shifts of up to 16 hours during staffing shortages, but the heat is one of the primary issues.

If the Department of Corrections were to install air conditioning, it could reduce turnover, which could in turn reduce the amount of money the department spends on overtime to get officers to fill in during short-staffed days.

“You might think you’re saving in one way by not putting air conditioning in,” Caruso said. “But you’re actually probably spending double the amount the other way.”