Being a journalist often requires imagining yourself living someone else’s life. To report my latest story, I not only had to mentally put on someone else’s shoes, I had to place myself in their prison cell on an excessively hot day. I’ve certainly lived through my share of heatwaves—in 2018, I spent a week of 123°F days in Jacobabad, Pakistan, which is considered to be the hottest city in the world—but even then, I had the option of taking a cold shower, buying an ice-cold drink, or ducking into an air-conditioned shop when it got to be too much. For most prisoners in the U.S., those beat-the-heat strategies simply don’t exist, and as temperatures rise due to climate change, they are paying the price in poor health outcomes—and in some cases, even death. Brown University environmental epidemiologist Julie Skarha estimates that the U.S. prison population death rate rises 5.2% for every 10°F increase in temperature above historical averages—counting some 635 prison deaths due to high heat between 2001 and 2019. Few state prisons are air conditioned, most egregiously in Texas, where triple-digit summer days can turn a short stint for unpaid parking bills into a death sentence. Advocates are pushing to make air-conditioning mandatory in Texas prisons, and while a prison air-conditioning bill sailed through the state's House of Representatives last month, it looks like it will wither in the State Senate this week as the legislation session draws to a close. “I’d love to see the AC go out during a heatwave in the Capitol while they’re in session,” says prisoner rights advocate Amite Dominick. That might be what it takes to convince legislators that air conditioning is a necessity, not a luxury. “It’s only when it hits your own house that you really want to pay attention to it.” |
