'They're Basically Baking': Texas Prison Air Conditioning Bill Heads to the Senate

Standing outside the state Capitol building, Rep. Carl O. Sherman veered off the script he’d prepared for the gathered reporters. According to the lawmaker, he had been visiting a state prison when a middle-aged white woman — one of the people incarcerated at the prison — approached him and apologized for being sweaty. She had just gotten off work, she explained.

“What work do you do here?” the legislator asked.

“I work on the HVAC systems,” she replied. Now that her shift had ended, she was heading back to her housing unit in one of the 79 of 107 Texas prisons that do not have air conditioning in all living quarters.

“How cruel is that?” Sherman asked his audience on the Capitol steps. “She’s working on HVAC systems to keep others cool where we have AC, but she’s coming back to a dorm where we do not have AC.”

For decades, advocates, attorneys and the state’s main correctional officers union have called on the Texas government to install air conditioning in prisons, which can reach 130 degrees in the sweltering summer months. And for decades, the legislature — most recently the state Senate — has refused to take up the issue. Sherman, who was joined at Thursday’s Capitol presser by fellow legislators and advocates, is hoping this time is different.

There are currently four bills focused on temperature control, and one of them, Senate Bill 1708, passed through the House on Wednesday. If enacted, the bill would require prisons to maintain temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees. But its prospects in the Senate appear dim.

A similar bill passed the House two years ago and was never taken up by the Senate, a decision Rep. Terry Canales lays at the feet of Lt. Governor Dan Patrick. After all, as Canales points out, Patrick is the leader of the Senate, so he decides if and when bills can be introduced or debated on the Senate floor.

If Patrick doesn’t bring the bill to the floor, Canales told the Texas Tribune, “people [will] continue to roast alive.”

Patrick did not respond to a request for comment.

In an interview with the Observer, Jenny Hixon, an advocate with the Texas Civil Rights Project, echoed Canales.

“If you can't get any fresh air, and you can't get any breeze, you're basically baking,” Hixon says.

“The biggest opposition that we continue to hear is the price tag, which in this particular session doesn't make a lot of sense, since we're continuing to invest in things like Operation Lone Star.”

That operation — a much-maligned border initiative that faced a federal civil rights investigation last summer — has a reported price tag of $4 billion. Estimates vary as to how much it would cost to install AC in all state prisons that need it, but the state House says it would be about $545 million (or roughly a quarter of the cost of Operation Lone Star).

That said, Hixon adds she is “really hesitant to frame things in that way, because at the end of the day, the cost is not really the issue. We can't keep these people like this. It’s cruel.”

In filmed testimonials Hixon shared with the Observer, prison staff, incarcerated people and their loved ones talk about what it’s like to live in an uncooled cinderblock box when the summer heat arrives.

“If you can't get any fresh air, and you can't get any breeze, you're basically baking.” – Jenny Hixon, Texas Civil Rights Project

tweet this

One woman, Theresa, relayed that her husband felt like he was dying in his cell. Another woman, a prison employee, talked about how incarcerated people often wait weeks to consult with a doctor about a heat rash, and when the doctor finally gets to them, all they can prescribe is hydrocortisone from the commissary (which is usually sold out). Of course, there are far worse effects.

In late 2022, a study from Boston University, Brown University and Harvard University determined that roughly 13% of prison mortality in warm months between 2001 and 2019 may be attributable to extreme heat. That means the lack of air conditioning could have contributed to as many as 271 deaths in that period, which does not include the record-breaking summer of 2022, nor the three summers in which COVID-19 infections raged throughout Texas prisons.

As pointed out by the Tribune, this mortality rate is bound to worsen as global warming takes its toll on Texas. Further, as the legislators on the Capitol steps were quick to mention, incarcerated people aren’t the only population affected by the lack of AC.

As he was leaving the prison where he met the HVAC worker, Sherman was approached by a corrections officer who noticed him talking to incarcerated people.

“What about us?” he asked the lawmaker. “We’re here, too.”

According to the Texas State Auditor’s Office, there was a 40.3% turnover rate for correctional officers in 2021.

"I don't think it's a big leap that if you're working in a job where it's 130 degrees, you're not going to want to keep that job very long,” Hixon points out.

A spokesman from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice agreed.

“We have previously said that air conditioning would likely have a positive impact on helping to retain and recruit staff,” the spokesman told the Observer. The department says it does not have a position on the bills in play, but it has previously fought attempts to install AC units in stifling prisons due to financial concerns. In one case, the state spent $7 million to oppose an AC installation that ultimately cost $4 million.

Like Hixon, though, the lawmakers and legislative staff at Thursday’s press conference were eager to focus on the humanity of the issue, not the money. Collin Packer, Rep. Sherman’s communications director, pointed out that Texas law requires animal shelters to be properly air conditioned. No such law exists for prisons.

"When we view our fellow human beings as animals,” Packer says, “we can begin to excuse our inhumane behavior towards them.”