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The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has spent millions of dollars to address “excessive moisture and heat buildup” in its facilities, noting that “great care must be taken to maintain a comfortable environment.”
For chickens.
That language, lifted directly from the state prison agency’s agricultural policy on poultry, took on new meaning this week in a federal court ruling over the temperatures Texas maintains for the human beings in its custody. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman noted that the agency was capable of ensuring safe temperatures for laying hens, but that these kinds of protections “do not exist in inmate housing facilities.”
Pitman ruled that the extreme heat incarcerated people endure in Texas prisons violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. He ordered the state to fully air-condition its prisons by the end of 2029. The decision was a major victory for incarcerated people and advocates who have fought for years for such a mandate, but likely not the final word. The state has already said that it will appeal to the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
If the ruling holds, it offers Texas prisoners an end date to an annual ritual of desperation that has long included things like soaking clothes and bedsheets in toilet water and faking suicide attempts to be moved into air-conditioned psych wards.
That end date is three more hot summers away, and comes with a considerable price tag. Texas prison officials estimate that air conditioning every cell in the system will cost roughly $1.5 billion. But Pitman made clear in the ruling that financial considerations would “not be considered a legitimate reason” for failing to comply with the order.
Without that kind of legal pressure, prison air-conditioning projects often fall prey to budget considerations. In Iowa, corrections officials have spent 15 years asking lawmakers to fund air conditioning at two prisons. Gov. Kim Reynolds included $8.1 million for the projects in her budget this year, but lawmakers once again declined to fund them.
The consequences of that delay came into stark relief for one family on one of the hottest days this year. On July 15, Robert Buel, 57 years old, died of a heart attack at Anamosa State Penitentiary, where more than half the cells lack air conditioning. His official cause of death was heart disease, but his sister believes the prison’s heat contributed. Prisoner rights advocates say deaths like Buel’s — in which extreme heat may play a role without being recorded as the cause — occur every summer. Academic research has found a correlation between high temperatures and prison mortality.
The money to cool prisons can prove elusive even when lawmakers do budget for it. In Arizona, the legislature had allocated nearly $170 million over several years to install modern heating and cooling systems in state prisons. But amid a budget crunch, lawmakers cut roughly a third of that funding in 2024, leaving the conversion unfinished. Today, 24 Arizona prison units still rely on evaporative “swamp” coolers for taming the desert heat.
Those systems are cheaper and work by passing hot, dry air over water, rather than mechanically refrigerating it, and their limitations are familiar to people incarcerated across the Southwest. Writing for the Prison Journalism Project this week, Brian Quintanilla recalled living in a windowless cell at California’s Ironwood State Prison, where swamp coolers struggled against the desert summers and lack of fresh airflow, and temperatures inside his cell remained between 80 and 90 degrees into late September. “I have had many restless summer nights, when a river of sweat formed on my bunk,” he wrote.
Ironwood has since installed air conditioning, and Quintanilla said cells now stay between 70 and 75 degrees.
California is in the midst of an experiment to see that kind of improvement can scale, in the form of a $38 million pilot program to test air conditioning, insulation — or some combination of the two — at three of its 31 prisons, with the goal of keeping all indoor temperatures at or below 78 degrees. Results aren’t expected until mid-2029, and the program does not require any state action regardless of the outcome.
Meanwhile, prison staff in the state find themselves in a peculiar regulatory position. In 2024, California adopted new heat protections for indoor workers but exempted prisons and other detention facilities, citing concerns that air conditioning costs could reach upwards of $6 billion. The state is now developing separate rules for correctional facilities, with some protections kicking in at 87 degrees — five degrees higher than other indoor workplaces.
Stephen Knight, co-executive director of Worksafe, an occupational safety organization, pushed back on the exception. “The human body doesn’t handle heat differently in a prison than, you know, an Amazon warehouse,” he told Capital & Main.
Prisons aren’t the only place where incarcerated people are subjected to extreme temperatures. Detainees at immigrant camps in Virginia, Mississippi and New Jersey all reported dangerously hot conditions this summer when air-conditioning systems temporarily failed. While air conditioning can fail anywhere, many of the things people do in the free world when that happens — relocate, open a window, or take a shower — are unavailable in detention. “A lot of the time the power was out they just had them locked in their cells,” one detainee’s wife told The Guardian about the air conditioning failure in Mississippi.
But in immigrant detention, complaints about temperature can run in the opposite direction too, with detainees describing chronically frigid cell conditions. “It’s a cold you can’t imagine, unbearable,” a detainee named Mariana told El Pais earlier this summer.
Super-cooled detention settings are not new. Immigrant detainees, particularly near the U.S. Mexico border, have complained about “hieleras” or ice-boxes for over a decade. But soft-sided facilities like Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, are new. These tent-based structures functionally have no insulation, so while the constant air conditioning required to keep them habitable is effective, it also leads to interiors that “felt like near-freezing temperatures,” The Guardian reported this spring.
The Department of Homeland Security told the outlet that “claims facilities at Camp East Montana are unsafe or exposed are FALSE.”
