“In summer, I was in complete survival mode,” said Marci Marie Simmons, who was released from custody in 2021. “I felt like a caged animal.”
Attorneys for Texas inmates have asked a federal court to order the state to install air conditioning in its prisons, arguing that stifling heat behind bars is an unconstitutional form of cruel and unusual punishment.
According to The Texas Tribune, the multi-day hearing began on Tuesday. It centers on a series of claims made in a 2023 lawsuit, which alleges that temperatures inside Texas prisons regularly exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit—leading inmates to suffer, and causing hundreds of deaths over the course of the past several years.
“I’m really hoping that these federal courts will act in empathy and compassion, and even act responsibly, prudently, towards taxpayer dollars that are literally going to fund people being tortured and dying in Texas prisons,” Dr. Amite Dominick of Texas Prison Community Advocates told CW-39.
Texas’s prison system, notes the Tribune, houses an estimated 130,000 prisoners. But only one-third of its prison and detention facilities have full air conditioning, with many having no form of climate control whatsoever.
During the hearing, a former inmate named Marci Marie Simmons—who served time in three prisons for felony theft—described “oppressive, suffocating” conditions.
“In summer, I was in complete survival mode,” said Simmons, who was released from custody in 2021. “I felt like a caged animal.”
Simmons claimed that she once saw a kitchen worker bring an egg into a cell before cooking it on the concrete floor. Later, in 2020, Simmons said that she and two other inmates discovered a hallway thermometer that was covered with tape. They removed the tape, and saw a temperature reading of about 136 degrees Fahrenheit.
Marlayne Ellis, the state’s assistant attorney general, said that Texas wants to upgrade its air conditioning systems but would need legislators to appropriate more funds. In the meantime, Ellis said that the state has made a good-faith attempt to help inmates cope with high temperatures, offering respite areas, cold showers, and bottled water.
But Simmons told the court that whatever measures the state has implemented are ineffective: inmates weren’t given enough water to share amongst themselves, and dozens of prisoners would have to wait to share the same shower.
“I was trying to get across that conditions were dangerous during my incarceration,” Simmons said in the hearing. “The heat mitigation things that the state agency has put in place—they are ineffective.”
Jennifer Toon, the project director of the Lioness Justice Impacted Women Alliance, indicated that government attorneys have tried to “gaslight” the public by allegedly misrepresenting inmates’ causes of death.
“In [certain] autopsies, we’re seeing that people’s core temperatures were 107 and 109 degrees,” Toon said. “And for the state to continue to gaslight us and our families and the public about this increase in deaths has nothing to do with the heat.”
“Live in your car in a parking lot in Walmart in August Texas heat,” she said. “Live inside there with the windows rolled up. That is the type of heat.”
Sources
Federal lawsuit could mandate AC in hot Texas prisons
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