As Texas enters peak summer months, bills to cool state prisons fail yet again

AUSTIN — The temperature in Austin this week hit 91 degrees. After the city was blanketed with an early morning, hot mist on Wednesday, it felt more like 96 by mid-afternoon.

Inside the state Capitol, where the thermostat hovers around a cool 70 degrees, Rep. Carl O. Sherman was contemplating the Day of Judgment. When Jesus returns, the pastor said, citing Scripture, he will embrace those who fed the hungry, clothed the naked — and visited the imprisoned.

“Our legislative priorities don’t line up with the first things he’s going to say when he comes back,” Sherman, D-DeSoto, said standing in a stairwell behind the House chamber. In Texas prisons, he added, “The heat is unbearable.”

In Texas, where the temperature regularly climbs over 100 degrees in summer, county jails must be cooled to between 65 and 85 degrees. But state law does not require prisons to have A/C. The conditions behind bars recently landed the state in court, after which the prisons department agreed to cool inmate housing for some, but most of the more than 100,000 inmates still eat, sleep and work in areas that lack air conditioning.

For the first time this year, lawmakers in the House voted to change that.

A bill that would have required the state to install climate control systems in all prisons sailed through the House with bipartisan support. Just 18 of the 150 members in the GOP-majority chamber voted against the measure.

But the legislation died unheard in the Senate, one of many criminal justice casualties this year.

The decision disappointed Sherman, who bemoaned the “selective compassion” of his colleagues, and other representatives of both parties who backed the bill. Standing in the stairwell, a breeze from air vents in the historic building wafting through, Sherman mused whether switching off the prison board’s A/C during an upcoming summer meeting would press the issue.

“You ever root for a losing cause or a losing team?” he wondered aloud. “You know somewhere, at some point, we’re going to lose. It’s just a matter of when your heart is going to be broken.”

One in five of the state’s 100 lockups have no A/C, according to the prisons department, and nearly half are only partially cooled. There are about 34,000 air-conditioned beds for the roughly 117,000 inmates incarcerated systemwide.

The conditions regularly lead to lawsuits from inmates, some of whom describe living 23 hours a day inside hot cells, their nights spent lying on the floor atop wet bed sheets to stay cool. Dozens of inmates and guards fall ill every year. In the past, some have died.

House Bill 1971 would have required the prisons department to install climate control systems inside all state-run jails and prisons, including inmate housing areas and correctional officer stations. The installation would have been phased in over time, with the first third of the state’s lockups completed by the end of 2024.

The measure also had an important escape hatch: it would only need to be implemented if state lawmakers set aside the money to do so. It estimated $100 million for each of three phases.

With five authors, three of them Republicans, and 14 co-authors, the bill passed with resounding support in the House.

“This is the right thing to do. It’s the humane thing to do,” author Terry Canales said during debate on the House floor on May 14. The Edinburg Democrat has tried, unsuccessfully, to get this bill to the floor in past sessions. “The reality is in Texas, we are cooking people in prison.”

Once it got to the Senate, however, the bill was never heard from again.

It was referred to the Committee on Finance, which is chaired by Sen. Jane Nelson, a Flower Mound Republican and, as the lead budget writer, one of the most influential lawmakers in the building. Neither her staff, nor advisors for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Senate president, returned requests for comment on why a public hearing was not held on the bill.

Advocates said Nelson also did not respond to their pleas that she bring it up for debate.

“I wonder how many people will die or commit suicide this summer due to deliberate indifference of the Texas Senate,” Amite Dominick with Texas Prisons Air-Conditioning Advocates.

“One would think if the legislators could pass so many bills about the comfort and treatment of animals,” she added, referring to bills mandating better dog and cat welfare, “surely we could treat our Texas incarcerated citizens at least humanely.”

Scott Henson of Just Liberty, a nonprofit advocacy group, said the bill was one of many criminal justice measures that died in the Senate.

“The Senate does not want to do criminal justice reform of any type,” he said a few days before the session ends on May 31. “And that includes this.”

Sen. José Menéndez, who authored the legislation in the Senate, called the bill’s death “frustrating.”

“It’s very likely that at some point the courts will, someone will get a verdict that says we’re treating people inhumanely. I think we should do something about it,” the San Antonio Democrat told The News. “It’s sad.”

‘An act of cruelty’

Amid this failure, however, backers of the prison heat legislation pointed out one small victory.

Tucked into the state’s nearly $250 billion budget was a single paragraph requiring each state-run jail and prison to log the temperatures inside inmate housing areas once daily during the hottest months. Currently, the state does not take indoor readings at most of its prisons and until recently, it refused to release its outdoor heat logs as well.

Lawmakers tried to include this mandate to log indoor temperatures in the 2019 budget, but it was stripped out. This year’s biennium spending document is already making its way to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has stripped individual sections of the state budget in previous years.

There’s also $105 million available to the prisons department to retrofit its buildings, which may be used to install A/C, and some of the billions the state is getting in COVID-19 relief funds from Washington could also go for this use.

But Canales, the lead author of the heat bill, said anything short of coming up with a long-term plan to ensure all units are air conditioned is a failure on the part of state lawmakers. He called its death in the Senate “on brand for the Texas Legislature.”

“There’s no fiscal risk and so at this point, killing the bill is an act of cruelty,” Canales told The News. “It’s all fun and games until it’s your family member cooking.”