A federal judge has ordered Texas to air condition all of the state’s prisons by the end of 2029.
The ruling, released Tuesday, is a win for inmate advocates and their attorneys, who had asked the court to force the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to cool the entire prison system by that time. Just over a third of the agency’s 104 facilities were fully air conditioned as of Sept. 1.
In his order, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman found that conditions in Texas prisons without air conditioning violate the Eighth Amendment — which protects against cruel and unusual punishment — and that TDCJ’s current response to extreme heat is insufficient.
Pitman ordered the prison agency to immediately create and implement a plan to add air conditioning in every Texas prison. The installation, he said, must be completed no later than Dec. 31, 2029.
“In the face of clear evidence of risk — including ongoing injuries, deaths, and suffering every summer — Director [Bobby] Lumpkin’s failure to enact a meaningful, committed plan to install air-conditioning on the timeline that TDCJ has repeatedly indicated is possible is deliberate indifference,” the judge wrote in his 150-page order.
The decision came after Pitman, appointed by former President Barack Obama, declared in a 2025 ruling that excessive heat in Texas prisons is likely “unconstitutional punishment.” But the judge declined at the time to require TDCJ to install temporary air conditioning, reasoning that the option was not a permanent solution and was unlikely to be accomplished before a preliminary ruling would expire.
Pitman’s new order also throws a wrench into the agency’s budget planning for the 2028-29 biennium.
Publicly unveiled Aug. 28, TDCJ’s legislative appropriations request includes $289 million specifically to install prison air conditioning. It also asked state lawmakers for $591.8 million to build expansion dorms with climate control. Combined, the agency said these proposals would create more than 21,000 cool beds.
Still, the request was far less than what the agency told the judge it could obligate from the Texas Legislature in the upcoming budget cycle — a gap that Pitman noted in his ruling.
TDCJ said it was reviewing the ruling and couldn’t immediately comment.
Marci Marie Simmons, a previously incarcerated person who is among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, called the ruling a “huge win” for Texans.
“We’re just so excited,” she said, laughing and crying. “This decision is going to save lives, and that’s huge.”
This was not the first major court battle over prison air conditioning in Texas.
In 2014, several inmates at the Wallace Pack Unit sued TDCJ over extreme heat in the geriatric prison near College Station. Both sides eventually reached a class action settlement to install permanent air conditioning in the notoriously hot unit, prompting a federal judge to declare it “a new day in Texas prison history.”
A decade later, prisoner rights advocates launched a new legal fight by joining a complaint first filed in 2023 by Bernie Tiede, a high-profile inmate who experienced a medical emergency as a result of extreme heat in his cell. This time, the lawsuit covered every person held in an uncooled TDCJ facility.
Meanwhile, bills mandating climate control in state prisons have again and again failed to pass the Texas Legislature — despite state law already requiring county jails to be kept between 65 and 85 degrees.
As of Sept. 1, TDCJ reported that 53,676 cool beds were available in its prisons. The agency expects that this number would surpass 61,000 by the end of the year and reach close to 90,000 by early 2028. By then, the state’s prison population is also projected to top 150,000.
Heat makes the state’s lockups “a living hell,” inmates have said. It can also be deadly.
TDCJ has acknowledged that at least 23 people died from heat-related causes in its facilities between 1998 and 2012 — a likely underestimate, Pitman wrote in his order last year. Inmate advocates say at least 10 additional deaths between 2022 and 2025 can be attributed to the high temperatures, including three people whose autopsy reports reference heat as a possible contributing factor.
The agency disputes this alleged death toll, arguing that the cause could instead be attributed to drug overdoses or other medical conditions.
