Legal action aims to force criminal justice department to air condition prisons, where 85,000 are at risk of heat illnesses

Jason Wilson’s death was raised in testimony in a four-day hearing last week in federal court in Austin, Texas, where the state’s department of criminal justice is being sued for subjecting inmates to cruel and unusual punishment banned under the US constitution. The opening line of the complaint bluntly claims: “Texas prisoners are being cooked to death.”

With Texas reaching its summer temperature peak over the next few days, the complaint says that prisoners suffer 100F-plus heat on a daily basis. On average, 14 people die of extreme heat in their cells annually, the plaintiffs say – a figure the state disputes.

The legal action aims to force the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) to air condition all its prisons, about two-thirds of which currently lack AC. As a result, about 85,000 prisoners across dozens of correctional institutions are estimated to be at risk of heat stroke, exhaustion, nausea and other heat-related conditions, even to the point of death.

  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksOPMEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Private Prisons in the United States

    Harmful crime policies of the 1980s and beyond fueled a rapid expansion in the nation’s prison population. The resulting burden on the public sector led to the modern emergence of for-profit prisons in many states and the federal system. Of the 1.2 million people in federal and state prisons, 8%, or 90,873 people, were in private prisons as of year end 2022.1

    States show significant variation in the use of private prisons. At one end of the spectrum, Montana incarcerates almost half of its prison population in privately run facilities, but in another 23 states, private prisons are not used at all. A total of 27 states and the federal government use private corporations like GEO Group, Core Civic,2 LaSalle Corrections, and Management and Training Corporation to run some of their corrections facilities.

    Montana is not alone in its heavy reliance on private prisons. Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Tennessee rely considerably on private prisons for housing sentenced people. In these states, between 20% and 39% of the prison population resides in a for-profit prison (See Table 1).

    I wonder if these are actually state owned since they mention saving the tax payers money by letting them die. For profits need the body count.