“Surviving every summer”: in Texas, a prisoners’ rights organization denounces detention conditions during the hot summer months, following the death of three detainees.
The organization took legal action to demand that the state of Texas enforce legal limits for temperatures inside cells, which must be between 18 and 29 degrees.
This involves installing air conditioning, as the majority of prisons administered by the Texas Department of Justice (TDCJ) have none or only partial air conditioning.
There are a total of only 45,689 air-conditioned beds for 134,000 inmates.
Amite Dominick, the president of this organization, the Texas Prisons Community Advocates (TPCA), believes that a court decision favorable to prisoners’ rights would serve as a precedent for other states facing the same problem.
“We see that with climate change, it impacts prisons throughout the United States,” she explains.
Amite Dominick
Photo François PICARD / AFP
To advance its demands, the organization is relying on the deaths of three prisoners in 2023.
Patrick Womack, 50, who was denied a cold water bath by the prison, and John Castillo, 32, who went for ice water 23 times before being found dead. Both had a body temperature above 41 degrees. And Elizabeth Hagerty, 37, who sought help several days before her death because her health was worsening due to the heat and rashes on her body.
“Every summer, (…) we lose lives because we cook people in this brick building,” explains Amite Dominick.
“It’s really about surviving each summer,” she adds.
Toilet water
“When I was incarcerated, I used toilet water because it was cooler than tap water,” explains Marci Marie Simmons, a former inmate.
“It’s a humanitarian issue (…) Locking people up in these high temperatures is a cruel punishment,” says the woman who spent 10 years behind bars in a Texas prison.
She is now trying to raise awareness on the subject through social networks.
Samuel Urbina, 59, was recently released from prison after serving time for drug offenses.
“It was terrible. I don’t want to go back,” he admitted to AFP, adding that sometimes he felt ready to collapse inside.
Fans, ice water, baths
Amite Dominick says he asks the Texas Legislature to address the subject every year. Mentalities have been changing in recent years.
In 2012, the New York Times reported that John Whitmire, then a senator from Texas, claimed residents were “unmotivated” to pay for air conditioning to “sex offenders, rapists and murderers” at the expense of ordinary citizens in his state.
But during a hearing in early August, the director of the Texas Department of Justice, Bryan Collier, admitted that the heat could have contributed to the deaths of Patrick Womack, John Castillo and Elizabeth Hagerty in 2023, adding to the illnesses including they were already suffering.
Since 2017, his department has urged the Texas legislature to release funds. Last year, part of the requested amount was allocated, which enabled it to obtain 1,760 additional air-conditioned beds.
In the absence of air conditioning, he recalled, prisons continue to rely on fans, ice water, cold baths, and offers prisoners to transfer them to air-conditioned common spaces, such as the library. or the infirmary, to help them cope with the heat.
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