Texas Bills Requiring Prison Air Conditioning Stall Despite Ruling

A week after a federal judge declared hot conditions in Texas prisons unconstitutional, a legislative push to require air conditioning in every state prison has not gained traction, the Texas Tribune reports. None of the five bills to require prison cooling has been scheduled for a committee hearing yet, and the issue has hardly been mentioned during public hearings about how the state should allocate its estimated $194.6 billion two-year budget. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which oversees the state’s 101 prison facilities, asked lawmakers for $118 million to install air conditioning in about 11,000 units. Even if lawmakers grant that request, millions more will be needed to get to the at least $1.1 billion the agency says it would need to fully air conditionr prisons. “I don’t know how state leaders look at themselves in the mirror with this situation persisting,” said Rep. John Bryant, who authored a bill that would require full prison air conditioning. Since a 2018 House Corrections Committee wrote in that TDCJ’s heat mitigation efforts were not enough to ensure the well-being of inmates and the correctional officers who work in prisons, lawmakers have tried to pass bills that would require the agency to install air conditioning. None of those bills made it to the governor’s desk.

During that time, the state has also been slowly installing air conditioning, adding 11,788 “cool beds,” and it is in the process of procuring about 12,000 more. The addition is thanks to $85.5 million state lawmakers appropriated during the last legislative session. About two thirds of Texas’ prison inmates reside in facilities that are not fully air conditioned in housing areas. Indoor temperatures routinely top 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and inmates report oppressive, suffocating conditions in which they douse themselves with toilet water in an attempt to cool off. Hundreds of inmates have been diagnosed with heat-related illnesses and at least two dozen others have died from heat-related causes. The pace at which the state is installing air conditioning is insufficient, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman wrote last week. The lack of system-wide air conditioning violates the U.S. Constitution, and the prison agency’s plan to slowly chip away at cooling its facilities — over an estimated timeline of at least 25 years — is too slow, he wrote