More than two million Americans in state and federal prisons are living with limited air conditioning and few options to stay cool as heat waves sweep across the country, the Washington Post reports. “This is probably the greatest health and safety issue facing the prison population,” said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, who has been working on the issue for more than two decades. “When people argue, ‘I didn’t have air conditioning growing up,’ it’s also important to realize that we could leave our homes and go to the mall or a library. Those in prisons are sitting ducks.” Legislation pending in Congress notes that 13 states in the South and Midwest lack universal air-conditioning requirements for their prison facilities, with 22 states lacking even policies on temperature regulation.
At the federal level, the proposed Environmental Health in Prisons Act would direct the Bureau of Prisons to publish data on the prevalence of extreme heat and other “stressors” at its facilities. The legislation would offer $250 million in grants to address excessive temperature, humidity and other problems. Criminal justice experts say such analysis — though only looking at federal prisons — should have been done years ago. There are many states that do not keep indoor temperatures below a certain level, they note, despite the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. “As far as I know, the United States still has the Eighth Amendment; those incarcerated were not sentenced to cruel and unusual punishment or to swelter to death in a confined space,” said Carter White, supervising attorney of the King Hall Civil Rights Clinic at the University of California at Davis law school. “Maybe a common public reaction is, ‘Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,’ but with temps rising, this is akin to torture. The government just needs to fix it.”
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