Under pressure from a federal lawsuit, Texas state lawmakers are looking to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to air-condition the state’s prison system, where the heat contributes to more than a dozen detainees’ deaths a year.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has asked legislators for $118 million over the next two years to pay for cooling systems. A bill in the House Corrections Committee would provide $300 million over the next six years.
It’s still an uphill fight in the deeply conservative Texas Legislature. But it shows how climate change — and the threat of lawsuits — is forcing tough decisions on the lawmakers who oversee the country’s largest state prison system.
About a third of the state’s 140,000 beds are air-conditioned, and temperatures inside the uncooled prisons routinely exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer months. One study estimated that heat contributed to 271 deaths in the system between 2001 and 2019, an average of 14 a year.
