‘It’s torture’: brutal heat broils Texas prisons, killing dozens of inmates

When Jason Wilson was transferred in June to the Coffield Unit, a men’s prison in Texas , to serve his sentence for unlawful possession of a firearm, he was initially pleased by the change of scenery. He was aware that the lock-up could be challenging in summer, given its lack of air conditioning and the intense heat in the cells, but his previous institution had been depressing.

“It’s better here for sure,” he wrote in an email to an outside advocate.

Over the next few weeks, the tone of Wilson’s emails darkened. By late June the heat was rising, and he reckoned it felt like 115F (46C) in his cell. “I can withstand the heat,” he said, “but passing out water only once a day as it gets hotter isn’t cool.”

One day Wilson, a 47-year-old who went by the name “Blue”, wrote at 5.53pm: “They haven’t passed out any cold water today at all. This is ridiculous, doesn’t make sense.”

One of his last emails came on 1 July. “Pretty warm today … no cold water at all … it’s 5.45pm … we need cold water like now.”

On 7 July the outside advocate, Brittany Robertson, received an email written on Wilson’s own account: “You need to check on Jason Wilson immediately. I don’t think it’s good.”

She called the prison and was informed that guards had carried out a wellness check on the prisoner and he was fine. As she was on the phone, she received a message from Wilson’s father.

Jason had died in his cell two days previously, he said, on 5 July.

Robertson quizzed the prison official about why they had told her that Wilson was doing well when in fact his body had already been in the morgue for 48 hours.

The official replied: “I was just doing what I was told.”

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Jason Wilson’s death was raised in testimony in a four-day hearing last week in federal court in Austin, Texas, where the state’s department of criminal justice is being sued for subjecting inmates to cruel and unusual punishment banned under the US constitution. The opening line of the complaint bluntly claims: “Texas prisoners are being cooked to death.”

With Texas reaching its summer temperature peak over the next few days, the complaint says that prisoners suffer 100F-plus heat on a daily basis. On average, 14 people die of extreme heat in their cells annually, the plaintiffs say – a figure the state disputes.

The legal action aims to force the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) to air condition all its prisons, about two-thirds of which currently lack AC. As a result, about 85,000 prisoners across dozens of correctional institutions are estimated to be at risk of heat stroke, exhaustion, nausea and other heat-related conditions, even to the point of death.

Lead plaintiff in the case is Bernie Tiede, a former mortician serving 99 years to life for the 1996 murder of his companion, a wealthy 81-year-old widow. Tiede’s story was captured in the 2011 movie Bernie , a dark comedy by the director Richard Linklater starring Jack Black as Tiede.

Tiede gave evidence at the hearing, telling the court that he suffered a stroke last year when he was in a prison lacking air conditioning. He was brought into the court in shackles, with his face visibly drooping on one side as a result of the stroke, the Texas Newsroom reported.

“You would be arrested if you treated a dog like this,” Tiede testified.

Linklater, who lives in Texas, visited Tiede in prison last year and managed to film him surreptitiously on his phone. The director said he was shocked by what he saw.

“The guy had half his face frozen, just driven down because of the heat. It was really sad and really depressing. I left that day saying: ‘Is this the last time I’m going to see Bernie alive? Am I watching the state slowly kill him?’”

Linklater’s smartphone footage was played at the federal court hearing. He said that the proceedings were finally addressing a crisis that had dragged on for decades.

“It’s tortuous, it’s insane, it’s unconstitutional. And they keep getting away with it. But I think Texas might finally have met their match this time – the case is so strong,” Linklater said.

He added: “I can’t believe people are so inhumane. Eighty thousand human beings are being tortured for four months in the year. This is utterly preventable in the modern world.”

At the hearing, the head of the state’s prison service, Bryan Collier, blamed the failure to tackle the heat problem on a lack of cash. “It’s not a simple solution,” he said, telling the court that much more money had to be released to cover the costs of installing AC throughout the prison system.

Texas currently has $33bn in its reserves.

Related: Prisoners in Texas and Florida face biggest risk of increasingly deadly heat

The TDCJ denies that there have been any deaths caused by heat since 2012, insisting that fatalities during the summer months can be explained by inmates’ underlying medical conditions. Collier admitted, however, that extreme heat contributed to the deaths of three prisoners during the brutal heatwave that pummeled Texas last year .

One of the deceased, Elizabeth Hagerty, 37, died in June 2023 just days before she was scheduled to be released. Outside temperatures at the time were above 100 degrees, and she was struggling with a heat rash and had trouble breathing.

She had put a sign up in her un-air conditioned cell saying “please give me water”. It was ignored.

The Texas Newsroom obtained autopsy reports for the three prisoners. Another of them, John Castillo , 32, was recorded to have had a core temperature at the time of death of 107.5F.

Robertson, who had been in email contact with Wilson before his death, works with Texas Prisons Community Advocates, which is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. She told the court hearing that conditions in many state prisons were so bad this summer that inmates were lighting fires in an attempt to draw guards onto their rows to address ailing prisoners who had collapsed in the heat.

At Coffield, inmates were being forced to spend up to six hours in the exercise yard, known as the day room. The space is designed to provide respite for prisoners outside their cells, but has become a heat trap with no AC and no access to water.

Robertson’s inquiries suggest that Wilson had spent up to five hours in the day room immediately before he collapsed in his cell. A TDCJ spokesperson declined to comment on Wilson’s death, saying the department “doesn’t comment on pending litigation”.

The federal judge presiding over the lawsuit, Robert Pitman, has given both sides until 20 August to submit final arguments. He has not indicated when he will rule.

Until he does, the plight of thousands of Texas inmates continues.

Related: ‘Like an oven’: death at US women’s prison amid heatwave sparks cries for help

“It’s summer in Texas and death is here,” wrote Anthony Hanby in an open letter passed to the Guardian. “Extreme heat threatens my life every day now. Some days the water came so late that I was in a crippling delirium when it arrived. I’ve experienced days when it didn’t come at all and I opted to die screaming at my door instead of waiting for the heat to kill me.”

Hanby wrote the letter from Coffield, where Wilson died. He described the conditions as “torture by heat – Texas is killing people every year who haven’t been sentenced to death”.

The prisoner was being housed in “a tiny cell with sheet metal on the door for 24 hours a day”. He has high blood pressure and is fearful that he may not make it.

“If I don’t survive this summer, TDCJ will use their favorite excuse and claim that I died of a heart attack,” he wrote. “That will be a lie. It will be the heat that claims me, and if not me, then so many others like me.”