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Dozens of relatives and former inmates gathered at the state Capitol on Tuesday, shouting, screaming, and crying with desperate pleas for state officials to finally install air conditioning in Texas prisons.
The sorrowful mother cried out, devastated by the loss of her 36-year-old son who tragically passed away in a prison without proper cooling, exclaiming, “They are subjecting our infants to a torturous demise!”
Amidst an ongoing and relentless heatwave engulfing Texas, advocates for prison rights and a group of lawmakers are urging the governor to convene an urgent special legislative session to address the sweltering conditions within prisons. Despite previous unsuccessful attempts in the Legislature, the present heat emergency and concerns for the well-being of incarcerated individuals have compelled them to make another push for action.
“This is not a political issue. This is a humanity issue. I’m sick and tired of dealing with rich people problems,” said state Rep. Carl Sherman, D-DeSoto, referring to the property tax fight that swallowed the entirety of lawmakers’ summer. “This is about survival.”
Gov. Greg Abbott’s office did not respond to questions about the special session call Tuesday. In May, the Texas Senate killed the House’s proposal to invest more than half a billion dollars into air conditioning prisons.
The brutal heat inside Texas’ uncooled prisons has killed prisoners, sickened guards and cost the state millions of taxpayer dollars in wrongful death and civil rights lawsuits. Though the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has not acknowledged that a prisoner died from the heat since 2012, a multi-university study reported last year that as many as 13% of deaths in Texas prisons during warm months could be caused by the heat.
This year, since mid-June, at least nine prisoners have died of reported heart attacks or cardiac events in uncooled prisons where the outdoor heat indices were above 100 degrees, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of prison death reports and weather data. At least another 14 have died of unknown causes in extreme heat, often found unresponsive in their cells by prison staff.
The extent of the heat’s involvement in the 23 deaths remains uncertain. Amanda Hernandez, a spokesperson for TDCJ, emphasized that it would be incorrect to classify any death as heat-related until a thorough investigation is concluded.
Last week, she said the agency had preliminarily ruled at least four of the cardiac arrest deaths as unconnected to the heat, though autopsies are still pending. In at least one case, the agency believed a 35-year-old man who died of cardiac arrest was on drugs, which notoriously run rampant inside Texas prisons.
But heat-caused deaths are often undercounted and misclassified, according to medical experts, and an abundance of studies link an increase in fatal heart failures to extreme heat. Often, it’s impossible to know if a heart attack or any other fatal event was caused by heat stroke unless the body temperature is measured at the time.
It remains unclear whether TDCJ checks the temperatures of inmates experiencing medical distress amidst heat waves.
The significance of the heat is apparent for prisoners and their loved ones. On the day before her son’s demise, Tona Southards received a phone call in which he expressed his discomfort, confessing, “Mama, I’m frightened.”
On June 28, Jon Anthony Southards, aged 36, passed away under undisclosed circumstances at the Estelle Unit in Huntsville. He was discovered unresponsive in his cell later that evening. According to the TDCJ heat logs, the heat index outside the prison rose to 116 degrees on that particular day.
On Tuesday, his mother made a powerful statement in front of lawmakers and the press. She stood before them, clad in his TDCJ ID tag and the well-known “prison whites” outfit assigned by TDCJ. With heartfelt sermons, she reminisced about her son’s remarkable artistic and musical abilities while condemning the state for its involvement in his untimely demise.
She shouted, “While it may be too late for my son, Jon Anthony Southards, there is still hope for the incarcerated men and women. This has to stop!”
In most living areas of over two-thirds of Texas’ 100 prisons, air conditioning is absent. Every summer, thousands of officers and tens of thousands of prisoners endure the harsh conditions of concrete and steel buildings with inadequate ventilation. Despite triple-digit temperatures outside, the thermometer readings often soar even higher within the prison walls.
Sherman pointed out that when people claim to have grown up in a house without air conditioning, they fail to consider the conditions of living in a metal or brick building on the fourth floor, where there was limited ventilation and restricted access to the outdoors.
In the press room of the House Speaker and on the steps of the Capitol, a call-and-response emerged among individuals who had personal or familial experience of the dreaded Texas summer in prison. As tears streamed down their faces, they interjected “right now!” during speeches, emphasizing the pressing nature of their concerns.
Sherman concluded that the heat today was unbearable, and he anticipated it would only intensify further. He expressed his reluctance to continue witnessing the grief of more mothers who had tragically lost their children due to our lack of thoughtfulness.
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