Texas, under Gov. Greg Abbott’s stewardship, is hardly a bastion of human rights. When the state isn’t torturing immigrants, it’s also slow-roasting inmates in prisons that lack air conditioning. Texas ain’t Maine. It’s hot as hell, even hotter because Satan actually installed air conditioning. He’s not a monster.
According to a July 2022 Texas A&M University report, Texas prisons often reach 110 degrees. Some prison cells have even hit 149 degrees. The Texas A&M report reveals that just 30 percent of Texas prison living areas have air conditioning, compared to the more than 98 percent of Texas homes that have AC. This isn’t a luxury that inmates are denied but a basic standard of living in a state that is only getting hotter.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice operates about 100 prisons, and just 31 are fully air conditioned while 55 have AC in “limited areas.” According to a 2022 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 271 deaths between 2001 and 2019 have been linked to extreme heat days.
Texas is not so broke-ass that it can only afford to cool prisons with a few rickety fans and a prayer. In fact, the state has spent more money fighting efforts in court to install air conditioning than it would have cost to put in AC in the first place.
Despite a $32.7 billion budget surplus, state legislators this year once again refused to devote a red hot nickel toward cooling their state’s dangerously hot prisons. Even if they don’t care about the inmates, the extreme heat also makes it hard to retain prison staff.
This is barbaric, but it’s apparently good for business. Texas Public Radio reports that the price of bottled water increased by 50 percent in prison commissaries across Texas last month. When the free market meets a desperate, captive consumer base, the winners are usually predatory ghouls.
The “bread and water” diet was deemed cruel and unusual punishment, but at least they gave you the water. Prison guards do pass out glasses of cold water each day, but a single glass is bullshit during an ongoing heatwave. The TDCJ insists that prisoners have access to tap water, but the Republican-run state predictably has some of the worst tap water in the US. You can thank the corporate polluters that have a welcome home in Texas.
A depressing but not shocking data point is that Texans who live in low-income communities, especially Black and Hispanic people, flat-out don’t believe the drinking water is safe, and they don’t live in prisons that are more than 50 years old.
“I would never drink the water at the tap,” said Don Aldaco, a recently paroled man who spent 24 years in various TDCJ facilities. “I would always get a piece of a sheet and I would tie it on the actual spigot, like a filter. I would have to change it like every other day because of all the rust and all the crud coming out.”
Current inmates have claimed that the tap water in some prison facilities smell like sewage.
“I actually begged him not to [drink the tap water],” said Amy Aguilar, whose loved one is at TDCJ’s Ferguson Unit. Her significant other — whose name she asked TPR to not use — has described the water as “rancid” smelling. And she said she was concerned about the quality.
“Do you smell the sewer?” Aguilar said she asked him, “And he goes, 'you kind of just smell it all. It's just this big ole rich mix of rancid smell.'”
A TDCJ spokeswoman dismissed the claim, and really, who are you going to believe — the nice prison official or known felons who drink shit water?
Commissary vendor Royal Pacific Tea Company requested to raise the prices in March, before its contract was even complete, and according to released emails, this occurred in concert with the state prison system.
We assume the people involved will nonetheless sleep well in their air-conditioned bedrooms.
[TPR / Texas Tribune]
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I mean, what do you want to say? This is evil.
And yet, I'm quite sure that SCOTUS will point out that a right to air conditioning wasn't the historical norm in the 1700s and 1800s and therefore folks will just have to fucking die. Whaddaya gonna do?
I mean, I'm not actually a lawyer b/c I never took the bar exam, but as bad as this is, what pushes my own personal rage buttons isn't that there exists some fuckers who made things this bad.
My own personal rage button reacts to the fact that the courts aren't just absolutely screaming that pure, drinkable water and air conditioning are fucking required YESTERDAY.
Some people are gonna murder, and some of those are going to use heat torture to do it. What matters is how your society responds, and ours is failing at every level.
Judges, courts, and lawyers, I'm looking at you in particular.
The bit about how they've spent more fighting this in court than it would have cost to implement speaks volumes. The cruelty is always the point. Always punitive over reformative plus a grift so lots of rich people can capitalize on the continued suffering.