Texas bills requiring air-conditioned prisons languish despite temperatures being ruled unconstitutional

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A week after a federal judge declared hot conditions in Texas prisons unconstitutional, a legislative push to require air conditioning in every state prison has not gained significant traction.

None of the five bills lawmakers have filed to require prison cooling have been scheduled for a committee hearing yet, and the issue has hardly been mentioned during public hearings about how the state should allocate its estimated $194.6 billion two-year budget.

Officials from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which oversees the state’s 101 prison facilities, asked lawmakers for $118 million over the next biennium to install air conditioning in about 11,000 units. Even if lawmakers grant that request, millions more will be needed to get to the at least $1.1 billion the TDCJ says they would need to fully air condition their prisons.

“I don’t know how state leaders look at themselves in the mirror with this situation persisting,” said Rep. John Bryant, D-Dallas, who authored a bill that would require full prison air conditioning. “I’m hopeful this will be treated more seriously this session. It’s a moral and now a legal responsibility.”

Since a 2018 House Corrections Committee wrote in their 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 also been slowly installing air conditioning. They have added 11,788 “cool beds,” and they are 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 last week. 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.

Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said in an emailed statement 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.

That may not be enough to satisfy Pitman’s ruling or some state lawmakers. Bryant said he wants to see $500 million allocated to the effort this session.

“The state must fully fund the system now, in this legislative session,” said Erica Grossman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs who sued Bryan Collier, the prison agency’s executive director.

Pitman declined to require temporary air conditioning, noting that this would only undermine the speed at which TDCJ can install permanent air conditioning. Instead, the case will likely move to a trial. The plaintiffs are expected to win and be entitled to “expeditious installation of permanent air conditioning,” Pitman wrote.

In the meantime, Grossman and the plaintiffs she is representing are urging lawmakers to allocate more funding to prison air conditioning.

In 2021, a bill that set a seven-year time limit on air conditioning installation cleared the House on a 123-18 vote. The bill died in the Senate Finance Committee, where it never received a hearing.

Two years later, lawmakers tried again to no avail.

“This comes down to political will,” said Amite Dominick, who has worked on prison air conditioning legislation for multiple sessions and founded Texas Prison Community Advocates, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “They would rather continue an image of tough-on-crime than be humane.”

This session, four prison heat-related bills filed by House members have been referred to the House Corrections Committee: House Bill 1315, House Bill 2997, House Bill 3006 and House Bill 489. None have been scheduled for a hearing.

HB 1315, by Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, and HB 489 by Rep. Jon Rosenthal, D-Houston, are identical and would require each cellblock, dormitory and common area in Texas prisons to be equipped with an air conditioning unit. Temperatures would have to be maintained between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, a rule that already applies to Texas’ county jails.

HB 3006, by Terry Canales, D-Edinburg, would require the installation of climate control in phases to be completed by the end of 2032 — if the Legislature allocates funding.

HB 2997, authored by Bryant, goes further. It also would require the installation of temperature gauges in each area of the prison. Each year, the agency would submit a report to elected state leaders about the number of incidents in which the required temperature wasn’t maintained.

“We added that so we can monitor whether or not TDCJ is complying with the requirements,” Bryant said, explaining that lawmakers previously have been given reports that offer an average of the temperatures across the entire facility, occluding the heat inside some cell blocks.

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.”

In the upper chamber, Sen. José Menéndez, D-San Antonio, along with six other Democratic state senators, filed Senate Bill 169, which would require that prison temperatures be maintained between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

The bill has been referred to the Senate Finance Committee but has not been scheduled for a hearing. Huffman did not answer questions about whether she has plans to schedule a hearing.

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