As summers grow hotter, incarceration becomes increasingly dangerous for people living and working behind bars.
Windowless buildings, solidly constructed decades ago for confinement, hold not only people but also heat, turning the buildings into ovens as temperatures continue to rise. When night provides only the most meager of its cooling mercies, the problems worsen – more correlated deaths, more hospital visits, and more admissions to prison infirmaries on the hottest days.
“We had two phone calls today regarding the heat,” a Prison Society Helpline staffer reported last week about the heat situation at one state prison. “One person shared a cell reaching 109 degrees, another shared 90+ degrees. Commissary has run out of fans to sell the incarcerated women.”
Health, safety, survivability
As each summer is hotter than the last, extreme heat is a recurring condition that prisons must address. Air conditioning is no longer an amenity as it may have been many many summers ago. Rising temperatures make air conditioning a necessity, like food and water. It’s a matter of health, safety, and survivability.
“What we keep coming back to is that we're really studying the intersection of two major societal crises: climate change and mass incarceration, and the health harms that emerge where those crises overlap,” Drexel University epidemiologist Jaquelyn Jahn told Prison Society officials at a briefing on her work.
Extreme heat raises the temperature on a fundamental question – when the state controls every aspect of an incarcerated person’s life, does it have the responsibility to ensure that those lives are survivable? What is society’s moral obligation to people subjected to extreme heat with no ability to mitigate its conditions on their own?
No relief from the heat
“While some of us in the free world may not have air conditioning either, we are not confined to a tiny windowless room with another person for the majority of the day,” said Noah Barth, the Prison Society’s director of prison monitoring.
“We can go outside, into stores, workplaces, and areas of recreation to find relief from the heat,” he said. “We can bathe and drink cold beverages as we please. Being confined in these spaces causes unnecessary misery, is a health risk, and is a fuel for violence.
“As summers get hotter and longer, the lack of air conditioning in many prison and jail housing units has taken the shape of a human rights violation,” Noah said.
Issues with extreme heat aren’t confined to Pennsylvania. Jaquelyn, an assistant public health professor at Drexel University, and her colleagues are researching conditions in the 20 states with the highest rates of incarceration, including Pennsylvania.
“There's an urgent need to improve living conditions inside prisons through adequate accommodations and protective measures that reduce exposure to extreme temperatures,” Jaquelyn said.
“Specifically, we think that should include changes to prison health care systems so they're better prepared for climate-related health challenges. It also likely means improving working conditions and routinely monitoring indoor temperatures,” she said.
“It’s tragic. It’s definitely a human rights issue. There have been some really horrible tragic incidents related to climate change across the country in prisons. And those deaths are preventable,” Jaquelyn said.
At particular risk are women and people in solitary confinement, she said.
Interestingly, she said, some national research seems to indicate that even though prisons in the South are more impacted by extreme heat, people incarcerated in prisons in the Northeast experienced a higher risk of mortality associated with high heat.
It’s not clear why that’s the case, she said, although some preliminary hypotheses suggest that the prisons, some of them more than a century old, weren’t originally built to weather extreme heat. Also, perhaps, people in once-cooler regions of the country have not become acclimated to managing heat.
In preliminary findings, Jaquelyn and her colleagues have been able to correlate added deaths, out-of-institution hospital visits, and in-prison medical infirmary admissions to days of extreme heat.
Extreme heat correlates with increased mortality
Tracked over 23 years, mortality risk was 21 percent higher on days of extreme heat compared to days on which mortality is lowest, according to Jaquelyn’s preliminary data analysis. The effects of extreme heat continue beyond the hottest individual days, as health problems build up and manifest themselves.
Take the reports from SCI Cambridge in northwest Pennsylvania.
“Inmates on A, C, and D units have heat exhaustion and are getting sick and bad heat rash,” a woman incarcerated at Cambridge wrote to the Prison Society. “Inmates on D unit are only allowed to get ice once a day, and we are taking cold showers constantly just to cool off, cause we have no fans at this moment.”
“It’s cruel and unusual punishment to house inmates in over 100 degrees,” she wrote.
Fortunately, as the years have gone by, many of Pennsylvania’s state prisons have at least some air-conditioning. SCI Cambridge, for example, has cooling in some areas, but not in several housing units.
And at SCI Huntingdon in Huntingdon County, where temperatures have risen well above average in 10 of the first 15 days of the month, there is no air conditioning whatsoever.
The situation in county jails is spotty, with as many as a half dozen without complete air conditioning coverage.
When air conditioning comes, it makes a difference.
Michael Buchanan, now a warden at Schuylkill County Prison in Pottsville, can relate. He has worked at the prison, which dates from the late 1800s with additions in the 1980s, for more than 20 years.
Until air conditioning was installed several years ago, he knew that he and the other corrections staff would be sweating through their shifts – just like the roughly 200 people incarcerated behind the walls with them.
“It was warm, uncomfortably warm,” he said. “We would put out jugs of ice water and wall-mounted fans for their recreation times,” but the relief didn’t extend to individual cells.
If the temperature stayed below 80 degrees and cooled off at night, it was bearable, he said. But on the extremely hot days and just-as-hot nights, there was no relief.
Now, “the building is more comfortable for all — for inmates and officers,” he said. The county agreed to add the air conditioning, air purification, and ventilation system in response to the pandemic. The jail's population has also decreased since then, which has attributed [sic] — just as much — to a cooler atmosphere inside, he said.
“I would say having your building climate-controlled is a wise move,” the warden said.
Wise, but not always easy.
“I understand counties who are operating with slim budgets as it is,” the warden said. “The cost associated with retrofitting a building to install air conditioning is high. I understand that’s a tough sell to a taxpayer base that might not understand the operations of a facility.
“It’s a tough environment to work in and live in if you don’t have air conditioning,” he said. “But I also understand the challenges to paying for it.”
In Philadelphia, Michael R. Resnick, Esq. Commissioner, Philadelphia Department of Prisons expressed appreciation for the city’s willingness to fund the air conditioning installed in September in all the Philadelphia Detention Center’s housing units.
Noah, from the Prison Society, had visited the Detention Center on a hot summer day prior to the installation of air conditioning, describing it as “close to unbearable.”
“Imagine stepping into a sweltering dorm: two tiers of cells with about 50 men in each. They line the bars, shirts off, desperate for some relief, as loud industrial fans churn hot air. Meanwhile officers are shouting orders and TVs blare. It’s a chaotic, unhealthy environment that pushes people.”
The prison commissioner applauded the change.
”The investment we were able to make to upgrade our HVAC system at the Detention Center has been both cost-effective and efficient since it improves both health and the living conditions for the incarcerated population in our facilities and for our staff,” he said.
“Please advocate on our behalf”
Meanwhile, as weather forecasts promise more hot days ahead, the woman at SCI Cambridge has an urgent request:
“Would you please advocate on our behalf … cause we really need your help.”
