Former Texas Prisoners Describe Sweltering Heat During Trial

Describing Texas prisons as so hot that inmates cooled off by splashing themselves with toilet water or faking suicide attempts to be moved to cooler medical areas, inmate rights advocates on Tuesday asked a federal judge to declare the state’s lack of air conditioning as cruel and unusual punishment unconstitutional.

Tuesday began a multiday hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to force Texas to fully air-condition a prison system that houses more than 130,000 inmates but has full air conditioning in only about a third of its 100 prison units. The rest have only partial or no air conditioning.

Inmate advocacy groups say temperatures inside prisons can exceed 50 degrees Celsius and that extreme heat has led to the deaths of hundreds of inmates in recent years. They want U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman to require Texas to keep temperatures in prison facilities and occupied areas between 18 and 29 degrees Celsius, the same temperature range required by law in county jails.

Texas isn’t the only state facing lawsuits over dangerously hot prisons. Complaints have also been filed in Louisiana and New Mexico. One, filed last week in Georgia, alleged that an inmate died in July 2023 after being left in an outdoor cell for hours without water, shade or ice.

The lawsuit filed in Texas in 2023 by Bernie Tiede, the former funeral director whose murder case inspired the movie “Bernie.” Tiede, who is serving a life sentence for killing wealthy widow Marjorie Nugent in 1996, suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure and has claimed his life was in danger because he was locked in a sweltering jail cell with no air conditioning.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Marci Marie Simmons, who was transferred between three Texas prisons while serving a 10-year sentence for robbery, described “oppressive and stifling” conditions as temperatures soared from spring to summer. She was released in 2021.

“This summer, I was in survival mode. I felt like a caged animal,” said Simmons, who is now the community outreach coordinator for Lioness: Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. She said the organization represents about 700 current and former inmates.

Simmons testified that she once saw a kitchen worker bring an egg into her cell and cook it on the concrete floor. In 2020, a thermometer in a unit hallway reached 136 degrees when Simmons and two other inmates peeled back the tape that was supposed to hide the reading, she said.

“I was shocked. It scared me,” Simmons said.

Deputy State Attorney General Marlayne Ellis said the state would like to provide more air conditioning, but is limited by the Legislature’s budget.

She also insisted that conditions in Texas prisons are not considered cruel and unusual. The agency has defended its alternative protocols for extreme heat, which include providing fans, towels and access to cooler “respite” areas. In 2018, Texas agreed to install air conditioning in a prison for elderly and medically vulnerable inmates.

But Simmons said access to respite areas was limited to short periods, ice water coolers did not hold enough water to supply an entire prison dormitory and up to 100 women waited to use a single showerhead that switched from hot to cold water.

Desperate women fake suicide attempts or “harm themselves” to be placed in a cooler medical unit, Simmons said.

A November 2022 study by researchers at Brown, Boston and Harvard universities found that 13%, or 271, of deaths in Texas prisons without universal air conditioning between 2001 and 2019 could be attributed to extreme heat. Prisoner advocates say those numbers will only increase as the state faces more extreme weather and heat due to climate change.

According to a report from KUT Radio in Austin, autopsy reports on at least three inmate deaths in 2023 mentioned heat as a possible contributing factor. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, however, said there have been no heat-related deaths in the state’s prisons since 2012.

Tiede attended Tuesday’s hearing. Since filing his lawsuit, he has been moved to a climate-controlled cell. But several prisoners’ rights groups have asked to join his legal fight and extend it to all Texas prisoners.

Charlie Malouff, vice president of the advocacy group Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, spent more than three years in Texas prisons, from 2015 to 2018. He said that in one unit, inmates would set fires just so guards would hose down their cell block. In another unit, he said he saw thermometers regularly approach 115 degrees or more.

“It was horrible. It deprives you of oxygen,” Malouff said.