Austin, Texas — To describe Prisons in Texas Because it’s so hot that inmates are splashing themselves with toilet water or faking suicide attempts to be moved to cooler medical rooms, activists asked a federal judge Tuesday to declare the state’s prison system’s lack of air conditioning unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment.
A multi-day hearing began Tuesday in a lawsuit that seeks to force Texas to fully air-condition a prison system that houses more than 130,000 inmates, but only about a third of the prison’s 100 units have full air conditioning. The rest have partial or no air conditioning.
Prisoner advocacy groups say temperatures inside can soar to over 120 degrees Fahrenheit (48.9 degrees Celsius) and that the extreme heat has led to hundreds of inmate deaths in recent years. They want U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman of Texas to order temperatures in jails and occupied spaces to be kept between 65 and 85 degrees F (18 and 29 degrees Celsius), the same temperature range required by law in county jails.
Texas isn’t alone in filing lawsuits over dangerously hot prisons. Cases have also been filed in Louisiana And New Mexico. Last week one was filed in Georgia alleged that an inmate died in July 2023 after being held for hours in an outdoor cell without water, shade or ice.
The Texas lawsuit was initially filed in 2023 by Bernie Tiedethe former undertaker whose murder case inspired the film “Bernie.” Tiede, who serving a life sentence for the 1996 murder of Marjorie Nugent, a wealthy widow who has diabetes and hypertension and claimed his life was in danger because he was confined to a cramped, unair-conditioned prison cell.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Marci Marie Simmons, who bounced between three Texas prisons while serving 10 years for aggravated robbery, described “oppressive, suffocating” conditions as temperatures rose from spring to summer. She was released in 2021.
“Over the summer, I was in complete survival mode. I felt like an animal in a cage,” said Simmons, who is now a community outreach coordinator for Lioness: Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. She said the organization represents about 700 current and former inmates.
Simmons testified that she once saw a kitchen worker bring an egg into her cell and cook it on the concrete floor. In 2020, a hallway thermometer in one of the units reached 136 degrees when Simmons and two other inmates pulled off the tape that was supposed to hide the reading, she said.
“I was shocked. It scared me,” Simmons said.
Deputy Attorney General Marlayne Ellis said the state would like to install more air conditioning, but the Legislature’s budget imposes limitations on that.
And she insisted that conditions in Texas prisons fall short of the standard for cruelty and unusualness. The agency defended its alternative protocols for extreme heat, including providing fans, towels and access to cooler “respite” rooms. In 2018, Texas agreed to install air conditioning in a prison for elderly and medically vulnerable inmates.
However, Simmons said access to holding areas was limited to short periods, coolers of ice water could not hold enough water to supply an entire prison and up to 100 women had to wait to use a single shower head that had been switched from hot to cold water.
Desperate women fake suicide attempts or “harm themselves” to be placed in a cooler medical unit, Simmons said.
A November 2022 study by researchers at Brown, Boston and Harvard universities found that 13%, or 271, of deaths in Texas prisons without universal air conditioning between 2001 and 2019 could be attributed to extreme heat. Advocates for prisoners say those numbers are only likely to increase as the state experiences more extreme weather and heat due to climate change.
According to a report from KUT Radio in AustinAutopsy reports on at least three inmate deaths in 2023 cited heat as a possible contributing factor. However, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has said there have been no heat-related deaths in the state’s prisons since 2012.
Since filing his lawsuit, Tiede has been moved to an air-conditioned cell. But several prisoner rights groups have called for him to join his legal fight and expand it to all Texas prisoners.
Tiede was present at the hearing on Tuesday and was expected to testify.