A bill to air-condition all Texas prisons likely to fail again in the Senate

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For a third consecutive time, a bill requiring prisons to have air conditioning has likely died in the Texas Senate.

House Bill 3006, by state Rep. Terry Canales, D-Edinburg, which would have required the installation of climate control in phases by the end of 2032, passed the House in early May. Still, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick never assigned it to a Senate committee, letting the bill miss a key deadline to advance it through the chamber. The contents of the bill could still be attached to another as an amendment or as part of a budget stipulation, but it is unlikely this late into the legislative session, which ends Monday.

“I will say this time was different. The other times the lieutenant governor referred it [to a committee], and it was the chairs of the finance committee who refused to grant it hearings,” said Amite Dominick, the founder and president of the Texas Prisons Community Advocates. “This time, the lieutenant governor hasn’t even referred the bill for a hearing to any committee, and we haven’t heard why, beyond he is holding several bills hostage.”

The bill would have mandated that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice purchase and install climate control systems to ensure temperatures are maintained between 65 and 85 degrees in certain areas. The installation would have occurred in three phases, capped at $100 million per phase, and completion is set for 2028, 2030, and 2032.

Even with the state staring down a constitutional violation over its hot prisons, the future of air conditioning in these facilities is again uncertain.

Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said in an emailed statement earlier this year that the supplemental appropriations bill will include the $118 million TDCJ requested to fund approximately 11,000 new air-conditioned beds. It also will include $301 million to construct additional dorms — which the prison agency requested to accommodate its growing prison population — and those new facilities will all be air-conditioned.

“They’ve tapped those funds for expanding the prison system. So not only are they understaffed and they can’t handle what they currently have, but they are going to use the funds for air conditioning to expand the facilities,” said Dominick.

This session, four prison heat-related bills filed by House members were given some hope when they were assigned to the House Corrections Committee: HB 1315, HB 2997, HB 3006, and HB 489. However, Canales' bill was the only one to make it out of the committee.

“For years, there has been a huge understaffing crisis in the Texas prisons, a crisis that will not be fixed until there is air conditioning. I encourage anyone who questions these bills to spend five minutes in one of these prisons. Officers are suffering along with the inmates,” said Erica Grossman, a Colorado attorney who represents inmates who are suing Texas over its lack of air conditioning in state prisons.

Even with the money in the supplemental appropriations bill, officials from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which oversees the state’s 101 prison facilities, have said they need millions more to get to the at least $1.1 billion the agency says it will need to fully air condition its prisons.

Since the House Corrections Committee wrote in its 2018 interim report to the Legislature that TDCJ’s heat mitigation efforts were not enough to ensure the well-being of inmates and the correctional officers who work in prisons, lawmakers have tried to pass bills that would require the agency to install air conditioning. None of those bills made it to the governor’s desk.

During that time, TDCJ has been slowly installing air conditioning. The department also has added 11,788 “cool beds” and is in the process of procuring about 12,000 more. The addition is thanks to $85.5 million state lawmakers appropriated during the last legislative session. Although not earmarked for air conditioning, an agency spokesperson said all of that money is being used to cool more prisons.

Still, about two-thirds of Texas’ prison inmates reside in facilities that are not fully air conditioned in housing areas. Indoor temperatures routinely top 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and inmates report oppressive, suffocating conditions in which they douse themselves with toilet water in an attempt to cool off. Hundreds of inmates have been diagnosed with heat-related illnesses, court records state, and at least two dozen others have died from heat-related causes.

The pace at which the state is installing air conditioning is insufficient, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman wrote in a 91-page decision in late March. The lack of system-wide air conditioning violates the U.S. Constitution, and the prison agency’s plan to slowly chip away at cooling its facilities — over an estimated timeline of at least 25 years — is too slow, he wrote.

An internal investigation also found that TDCJ has falsified temperatures, and an investigator hired by the prison agency concluded that some of the agency’s temperature logs are false. Citing that report, Pitman wrote “The Court has no confidence in the data TDCJ generates and uses to implement its heat mitigation measures and record the conditions within the facilities.”

Even so, Pitman did not require the state to install air conditioning in his ruling; instead, he forced the plaintiffs to proceed with a trial before a judge.

“We have rights as Americans. If we can kill people, torture people, because that is what this is, and put people to death with heat in the states that we live in and have that be okay, then the Constitution doesn’t mean anything,” said Grossman.

Dominick said, unfortunately, the best options to get Texas prisons air-conditioned would be for the court system to force the state to install them.

“When I initially chose what our organization was going to focus on with limited resources, I purposely didn’t choose legal because I thought it was going to take longer and because of the excess money that it’s going to cost the taxpayers, and lawsuits. I believe I was naive at the time,” she said.

The court case is currently on an expedited schedule. Still, whatever the judge decides will likely end up in an appeal potentially extending the state's deadline for installing air conditioning for several years.

“I think anything that indicates that (lawmakers) are being humane to prisoners may decrease the likelihood of them staying in office. It’s simply not a priority for them,” said Dominick.

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