The Militant - October 1, 2012 -- Inmates die from severe heat in Texas prisons

Vol. 76/No. 35 October 1, 2012

Inmates die from severe
heat in Texas prisons

BY STEVE WARSHELL
HOUSTON—On July 30, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Eugene Blackmon, a prisoner in the C-8 dormitory at the Texas state prison in Beeville, could sue the warden and prison officials for keeping him and 53 other inmates locked up with the windows sealed and no air conditioning. Blackmon charges these conditions endangered his health and violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Blackmon said the warden and others also turned on the unit’s heaters—and then failed to respond to numerous grievances he filed about the heat and its debilitating effects on his health, reported the New York Times.

These conditions are all too common inside Texas prisons. In a two-month span during the summer of 2011, 10 inmates of the state prison system died of heat-related causes. They were all housed in areas that lacked air conditioning, and several had collapsed or lost consciousness while they were in their cells. All of them were found to have died of hyperthermia, a condition that occurs when body temperature rises above 105 degrees, according to autopsy reports and the state’s prison agency.

Prison officials with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice have admitted that 12 inmates have died of heat-related causes since 2007. The lack of air conditioning in the prison system has been highlighted in recent weeks after lawyers from the nonprofit Texas Civil Rights Project sued the agency in federal court over an inmate’s death last summer. They also plan to file additional wrongful-death lawsuits.

Of the 111 prisons overseen by the agency, only 21 are fully air-conditioned.

A Texas law requires county jails to maintain temperature levels between 65 and 85 degrees, but the law does not apply to state prisons.

“People who don’t know what it’s like on the inside have a hard time understanding what it’s like,” long-time Houston area prisoner rights activist Ray Hill told the Militant. “There was no thought of air flow when they built these places and everyone is housed in cells with three solid walls and bars on one side. The Ramsey Unit where I was incarcerated in Rosharon, Texas, was like one big heat sink.

“Most prisons only provide refrigerated air for classrooms and some offices. For men in the upper tier cell blocks, they may come in from working all day in the fields only to find 125 degree heat for most of the night,” added Hill. “The only thing they have to cool off is the evaporation of their own sweat.”

In June, the Texas Civil Rights Project filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Sandra McCollum, Stephen McCollum and Stephanie Kingrey, the wife, son and daughter of Larry Gene McCollum. They accused prison officials of causing his death by keeping him in the sweltering heat at Hutchins State Jail, where he had a seizure around 2 a.m. on July 22.

“There’s pets in pounds that have better conditions,” said Stephen McCollum, 30, at a news conference in Austin announcing the lawsuit.

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