A federal lawsuit alleges inmates are dying in hot Texas prisons without air conditioning. (Inset photo from KXAN-TV/YouTube; Background photo from CBS News/YouTube)
Sweltering triple-digit heat and lack of air conditioning in Texas state prisons has led to hundreds of deaths, leading in some cases to prisoners flooding their toilets and lying down in the water on the cell floor to cool down, according to a lawsuit filed by a prisoner who suffered heat-related stroke symptoms while housed in one of the lockups.
Bernhardt Tiede II, 65, imprisoned for the murder of an 81-year-old widow and whose story dramatized in the 2011 movie “Bernie,” being housed in a cell that reached 112 degrees at the Estelle Unit in Huntsville, Texas, his lawsuit said.
“We’re not trying to make this lush, we’re trying to make it humane,” said Lancy Lowry, former head of the Correctional Officers Union, court documents said. “These are third world conditions. We’re supposed to run prisons, not concentration camps. These are institutions for incarceration. The incarceration is their punishment. Not cooking them to death.”
The plaintiffs’ attorney, Jeff Edwards, whose 2014 case involving heat stroke deaths led to the installation of air conditioning at the Wallace Pack Unit near College Station, told reporters this is an easy fix.
“What is truly infuriating is the failure to acknowledge that everyone in the system — all 130,000 prisoners — are at direct risk of being impacted by something that has a simple solution that has been around since the 1930s, and that is air conditioning,” Edwards said.
A media representative from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which oversees prisons, declined to comment, saying the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
The spokesperson told Law&Crime that the agency recently created two new web pages, one outlining enhanced heat protocols and another showing the progress of construction of new air conditioning, following the allocation of $85 million in funding. Currently, 45,498 cool beds are available, with 13,714 either under construction or in the design phase, officials said.
The lawsuit says the extreme heat has wreaked havoc on Texas’ prisons for many years, leading to a significant spike in illnesses and deaths, the lawsuit alleges. Last summer alone, many people died, and hundreds more suffered serious heat-related illnesses because of the temperatures in prisons, court documents said. Most of the prisons in the state system lack air conditioning in the inmate housing units, leaving about 85,000 of the roughly 130,000 TDCJ inmates without air conditioning. The lawsuit said that as temperatures rise with global climate change, the problem will get worse.
“Last summer was the second hottest on record in Texas, with some TDCJ units reaching an astonishing 149 degrees,” the lawsuit said.
A U.S. Congressman for Texas put it plainly: “Being in a 115-degree prison is the definition of cruel and unusual punishment,” the lawsuit said.
Authorities said they identified 271 extreme heat exposure-related deaths in Texas prisons between 2001 and 2019 — an average of 14 deaths per year, court documents said.
For decades, thousands of inmates and correctional officers have fallen ill and needlessly suffered from heat-related causes, the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit listed some of the deaths.
One man serving a short prison sentence for driving while intoxicated suffered a heat stroke and died in 2011 after being in the jail for four days, court documents said. In the 38 days before his death, the temperature in the prison was over 100 degrees on 30 days.
About a week later, a 46-year-old man died from heat stroke, court documents said. The next day, a 50-year-old prisoner died from heat stroke. The man suffered from developmental disabilities and depression and was prescribed medication that made him extremely susceptible to heat stroke, court documents said.
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