The summer of 2024 is on pace to be one of the hottest on record in Pennsylvania, creating especially dangerous conditions in prisons and jails.
The Prison Society receives frequent requests to help incarcerated people across the state who are suffering through extreme heat this summer without air conditioning. Based on our latest survey of county jails and experience visiting them, at least six county facilities do not have air conditioning in all housing units. This is also true of nine state prisons. On very hot days, there is often nothing that these prisons can do to bring the temperature down to a bearable level, leaving incarcerated people–who are especially vulnerable to heat-related illness–in danger.
Without laws regulating temperatures behind bars and investment in costly renovations to install air conditioning, the problem will only get worse as climate change blankets the state with increasingly suffocating heat.
Without AC, antiquated prisons become “ovens”
Many prisons were built before air conditioning became commonplace, and their archaic design makes them difficult to cool down.
“What you often find is that when a prison doesn't have air conditioning, it also means that it doesn't have air flow at all,” says Noah Barth, the Prison Society’s director of prison monitoring. There are few windows, and even fewer that open in these old prisons, some of which are built from heat-retaining stone and resemble medieval castles.
In State Correctional Institution (SCI) Huntingdon, built in 1889, the cell blocks “feel like ovens” whenever the temperature exceeds 75 degrees, wrote one incarcerated man in a letter to the Prison Society in mid-July.
“With the current heatwave and multiple heat advisories we have seen, the blocks are soaring in temperature, over 100 degrees of nonstop unrelenting sickening heat,” he wrote. Among the over 1,800 people incarcerated in SCI Huntingdon, “heat-related sickness is commonplace. I myself have been constantly dizzy, vomited various times, and even feel confused and lethargic.”
Even in prisons that have air conditioning systems, frequent outages occur. We have heard reports of cooling systems breaking down in several prisons in the past month, including the Delaware County’s George W. Hill Correctional Facility, Dauphin County Prison, and SCI Phoenix. In prisons without air conditioning, officials resort to a grab bag of old-fashioned methods to cool people down–distributing cups of ice and cold water, placing more fans in the unit, providing greater access to showers. But when it’s 100 degrees inside, these measures are simply inadequate. And unlike people in the outside world, incarcerated people have limited freedom to cool themselves down.
A man enduring sweltering conditions at SCI Rockview wrote to the Prison Society with a simple request–to get access to a cold water source throughout the day and night. The water that came out of the faucet in his cell was warm. He had already passed out once from the heat, he wrote, but didn’t seek medical attention, because “1, I can’t afford to keep on paying for [the copay],” and “2, they will only tell me to drink more cold water anyway.”
Climate control is a matter of life or death
Extreme heat can not only be torturous, but deadly. Incarcerated people are especially vulnerable because of their high rates of chronic disease and mental illness. Conditions like diabetes and medications to treat high blood pressure and mental disorders, for example, can make it harder for the body to regulate its internal temperature. Excessive heat is associated with an increase in prison deaths from all causes, including suicide and heart disease. A recent study found that deaths from all causes increase 7.4% and suicides increase 15% after a three-day heat wave.
To make matters worse, prisons also tend to be located in places that experience more days of dangerous heat per year compared to the rest of the country, according to a new study. And the frequency of extreme heat waves in those places is increasing, even parts of the country where they were once rare.
“Pennsylvania is actually emblematic of a place where attention really should be focused,” one of the authors of the study said.
Some antiquated jails and prisons in Pennsylvania, like Lancaster County Prison, are beginning to make renovations or build new facilities entirely to provide modern air conditioning. But there is a lack of laws and regulations that would mandate such upgrades.
Last month, legislation was introduced in the U.S. Congress that would require monitoring of environmental hazards in prisons, including extreme temperatures, and provide $250 million in grants to help address those issues. But the law would only apply to federal prisons.
Outfitting aging prisons with air conditioning requires large capital investments and political will that are rarely deployed for the benefit of people in prisons.
“Our society is reluctant to invest in what are perceived as ‘comforts’ for people in prison,” Noah says. “But in Pennsylvania prisons today, a lack of air conditioning has very serious implications for health and safety.”