"Incarcerated people in southern states had the greatest exposure to extreme temperatures, yet do not have access to universal air conditioning, researchers found."
"Marci Simmons thinks back to her days in a Texas state prison as a cruel game of psychological planning for the summer. “In April, you start preparing yourself for the heat,” she said. “Towards the end of May, when it starts to get hot, you start telling yourself, ‘OK, it’s only four months of this really bad heat.’ And then you kind of count down in your mind. It’s a mental game of survival.”
Simmons was incarcerated in Texas state custody for more than a decade. She did time in the Dr. Lane Murray Unit, a state-run women’s prison in Gatesville—one of many such facilities nationwide that does not have air conditioning in the living spaces. To keep cool on hot days, she and other women would lie on their cell floors in puddles of water drawn from the sinks.
She said she wasn’t always able to track indoor temperatures because maintenance workers kept a piece of electrical tape over the dorm thermostat to hide the temperature readings. But one scorching day in the summer of 2020, Simmons removed the electrical tape using the sticky sides of two maxi pads that she had attached to the end of a broom. The temperature read 136 degrees. “I thought, well, this is why they didn’t want us to know,” she said.
A study published in March in the journal Nature Sustainability puts her experiences into nationwide context. Evaluating the heat exposure of more than 4,000 prisons, jails and immigration detention facilities across the U.S. since the 1980s, researchers found that the number of hot days per year increased at over 1,000 facilities—mainly in the South. They found the states of Texas, Florida, Arizona and Louisiana had the most exposure to potentially hazardous heat days—yet none provide universal access to air conditioning in state-run prisons."
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