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“Plainly Unconstitutional”: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Climate Change
Photo by appledesign via iStock by Ghetty Images
On May 19, 2009, Marcia Powell was left in an outdoor chain-link cage for four hours at Arizona State Prison Complex-Perryville while she was waiting to be transferred to a new cell. The temperature that day reached 107 degrees. The cage was unshaded, and it is disputed whether prison staff provided Marcia with any water during those four hours. When Marcia finally collapsed from the heat and was taken to the hospital, she had first and second-degree burns on her body and a core body temperature of at least 108 degrees. Prison officials took her off life support just hours later. An autopsy report concluded that Marcia’s death was accidental, caused by environmental heat exposure.[1]
Perryville is located in Goodyear, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix about 40 minutes from where I grew up. I visited the prison ten years after Marcia’s death, in the summer of 2019, to observe legal visits with attorneys from the Arizona Justice Project. The visiting room was air conditioned, but the housing units where our clients lived were not. Instead, the units rely solely on swamp coolers, which cool air using evaporated water. The coolers are much less effective than air conditioning, as temperature logs from Perryville show that certain cells were still recording temperatures of over 100 degrees in July 2023.[2]
Vulnerability to Climate Change
People in prison are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, including extreme heat and worsening natural disasters. This vulnerability stems from the social and structural circumstances of the prison population, coupled with inadequate preparedness and response plans.
Social and Structural Circumstances
First, the health of the prison population is significantly worse than the rest of the country. People in prison have higher rates of certain chronic conditions and infectious diseases. For example, people in state prisons are diagnosed with asthma at twice the rate (16.7%) as non-incarcerated U.S. adults (8%).[3] These findings are exacerbated for older adults, defined as those 55 years or older. As of 2021, this group accounted for 15 percent of the country’s prison population and that number is rapidly rising.[4] These existing medical conditions can be worsened by climate change impacts, such as an increase in allergens and air pollutants that can trigger or worsen asthma.[5]
Disabilities, including hearing, vision, mobility, and cognitive disabilities, are also much more common among people in prison than they are among non-incarcerated U.S. adults. Almost half a million people with disabilities are locked up in state prisons on a given day, accounting for 40 percent of the country’s prison population.[6] People with disabilities are more vulnerable to climate change for a variety of reasons. Emergency warnings and response plans are not usually designed with accessibility in mind, and extreme weather events may disrupt ongoing medical care and access to essential medications.[7] These negative impacts are likely to be exacerbated in a carceral setting.
Lastly, over half of people in state prisons have reported some indication of a mental health condition. 14 percent reported serious psychological distress in the past 30 days (compared with 4 percent of non-incarcerated U.S. adults).[8] Many medications, including psychotropics, which are widely prescribed in prisons, interfere with temperature regulation, putting people at higher risk for heat-related illnesses and death. The Vera Institute of Justice has also identified increases in self-harm, including suicide, aggression, and conflict associated with higher heat indexes.[9]
Inadequate Preparedness and Response
Government and prison officials are woefully underprepared to protect the people in their care from the harmful, and sometimes deadly, effects of climate change.
As record-breaking temperatures become the new normal, 44 states lack requirements for universal air conditioning in their prisons.[10] Many of these states are in the hottest regions of the country. In Texas, which houses over 130,000 people in its prisons, only about a third of roughly 100 prison units are fully air-conditioned, while the rest have either partial or no electrical cooling.[11] While the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has not reported a single heat-related death in a state prison since 2012, a 2022 study from Brown University’s School of Public Health found an average of 14 heat-related deaths per year in Texas prisons without air conditioning. Between May and October 2023, people in Texas prisons filed 4,680 heat-related grievances about issues including lack of personal fans, lack of cold water or ice, and respite from the heat being denied or unavailable. That same year, the Texas House of Representatives proposed installing air conditioning in the majority of state prisons, but the bill died in the Senate.[12]
Natural disasters are also becoming more frequent and severe. When Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in September 2024, prison officials at Mountain View Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine delayed evacuations, forcing the people incarcerated there to stay as their cells flooded. It would be almost a week without lights, running water, or functional toilets before they were transferred to another facility. Two weeks later, as Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida, as many as 28,000 people remained in jails and prisons in mandatory evacuation zones.[13]
There is no unified federal plan to provide oversight or relief to people in prison during disaster events. Instead, states are responsible for developing and enacting their own emergency management plans. Of 40 states with publicly shared emergency management plans, only six include any protocols to keep people in prison safe in the event of a disaster. Notably, many plans include provisions for the use of incarcerated labor to mitigate climate disasters, but only one (Colorado) indicates any safety precautions for incarcerated work crews.[14] As wildfires devasted Los Angeles earlier this year, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation deployed more than 1,000 incarcerated firefighters.[15] These crews generally use hand tools to clear vegetation and slow the spread of the fire. This is grueling manual labor that leads to higher rates of certain injuries among incarcerated firefighters, including smoke inhalation.[16]
Advocacy Strategies
People in prisons, and their advocates on the outside, have not stayed quiet about the impacts of climate change. Inside, people protest dangerous conditions by peacefully refusing to return to their cells[17] and engaging in hunger strikes.[18] Ongoing litigation and legislative advocacy also aim to improve climate adaptation planning in correctional facilities.
Litigation
On March 26, 2025, federal judge Robert Pitman of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas found that the extreme heat in Texas prisons without air conditioning is “plainly unconstitutional.”[19] Plaintiffs in the case had requested a temporary injunction forcing the state to immediately start installing air conditioning in its prisons. The lawsuit referenced temperatures exceeding 120 degrees inside prisons and people drinking toilet water to cool off. Judge Pitman declined to grant the injunction, but warned the state that plaintiffs will likely win at trial and that the state could ultimately face an order to install air conditioning.[20] The ruling is significant, particularly because state and local governments have gone to astonishing lengths to avoid installing air conditioning in prisons.
Prior to this current litigation in Texas’s Western District, a group of individuals incarcerated in Wallace Pack prison brought a lawsuit in 2014 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, claiming that keeping them in temperatures that routinely exceeded 100 degrees was cruel and unusual punishment. After four years of litigation, in which the Texas Attorney General’s Office spent nearly $2.7 million defending the prison system, the case settled with Texas agreeing to keep temperatures at Wallace Pack at or below 88 degrees.[21] In 2016, Louisiana accrued over $1 million in legal bills fighting a lawsuit seeking to protect individuals on the state’s death row from dangerous heat and humidity. A plaintiff’s expert in the case estimated it would cost about $225,000 to install air conditioning on death row’s six tiers.[22]
Texas is just one of several states, mostly in the South, facing lawsuits over prison conditions when temperatures often rise above 100 degrees.[23]
Legislative Advocacy
Some state legislatures have also made progress in addressing the issue of dangerous heat conditions in prisons. North Carolina lawmakers approved a $30 million plan to install air conditioning throughout the state prison system in 2021, and the state’s Department of Adult Correction expects to have all housing units air conditioned by early 2026.[24] Arizona lawmakers have also allocated funds to upgrade all its prisons from swamp coolers to air conditioning by the end of 2026.[25]
In 2024, United States Senator Ed Markey and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley introduced the Environmental Health in Prisons Act to improve the environmental health outcomes of people in prisons. The legislation would direct the Federal Bureau of Prisons to publish data on the prevalence of, and exposure to, “environmental stressors” including air and water quality, temperature, humidity, mold, and contagious diseases. The legislation would also create a new $250 million grant program to directly address environmental health harms in federal prisons.[26]
With broader goals of creating oversight and accountability mechanisms that can address dangerous living conditions in the federal prison system, President Biden signed into law the bipartisan Federal Prison Oversight Act in 2024. The Act mandates routine inspections of all Federal Bureau of Prison facilities by the Department of Justice Inspector General and establishes a new Ombudsman to ensure the health, safety, and rights of people in federal prisons.[27]
Conclusion
As climate change impacts continue to grow in frequency and severity, it is crucially important that the two million people living in our country’s prisons and jails are not overlooked, or worse, intentionally ignored. Constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment demand adequate precautions to ensure the health and safety of people in prison, even in the face of unforeseen disasters.
[1]Arizona Prisoner, Abandoned in Outdoor Cage, Bakes to Death, Prison Legal News, https://www.prisonlegalnews.or... (last visited Jun. 5, 2025).
[2] Extreme Heat in Prisons: Arizona’s Unrelenting Summers, Dream.org (Jun. 13, 2024), https://dream.org/news-articles/extreme-heat-in-prisons-az/.
[3] Leah Wang, Chronic Punishment: The Unmet Health Needs of People in State Prisons, Prison Pol’y Initiative (Jun. 2022), https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/chronicpunishment.html.
[4] Abdallah Fayyad, America’s Prison System Is Turning into a de Facto Nursing Home, Vox (May 6, 2024), https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/24119956/prisons-elderly-aging-prisoners-criminal-justice.
[5] Climate Change and the Health of Socially Vulnerable People, EPA (Apr. 9, 2025), https://www.epa.gov/climateimpacts/climate-change-and-health-socially-vulnerable-people.
[6] Wang, supra note 3.
[7] Climate Change and the Health of People with Disabilities, EPA (Jan. 17, 2025), https://www.epa.gov/climateimpacts/climate-change-and-health-people-disabilities.
[8] Wang, supra note 3.
[9] Why Temperatures in Prisons and Jails Matter, Vera Inst. of Just. (Jul. 7, 2018), https://www.vera.org/news/why-temperatures-in-prisons-and-jails-matter.
[10] Janos Marton, Incarcerated People Need AC to Combat Extreme Heat. New Climate Funding Could Help, The Appeal (Apr. 22, 2024), https://theappeal.org/prison-air-conditioning-greenhouse-gas-reduction-fund/.
[11] Jim Vertuno, Judge Says Extreme Heat in Texas Prisons Is Unconstitutional but Doesn’t Order They Install AC, AP News (Mar. 26, 2025), https://apnews.com/article/texas-heat-prison-air-conditioning-judge-ruling-5d25ef8d7229c9e37cd73b4730eb1d4b.
[12] Documents Reveal Thousands of Texas Prison Heat Complaints in 2023—and Perilously Slow Grievance Process, Am. Oversight (May 22, 2024), https://americanoversight.org/documents-reveal-thousands-of-texas-prison-heat-complaints-in-2023-and-perilously-slow-grievance-process/.
[13] Nazish Dholakia, When Disasters Strike, Incarcerated People Are Often Left Behind—Then Tasked with Dangerous Cleanup, Vera Inst. of Just. (Oct. 18, 2024), https://www.vera.org/news/when-disasters-strike-incarcerated-people-are-often-left-behind-then-tasked-with-dangerous-cleanup.
[14] Morgan Maner et al., Where Do You Go When Your Prison Cell Floods? Inadequacy of Current Climate Disaster Plans of US Departments of Correction, 112 Am. J. Pub. Health 1382 (2022).
[15] Summer Lin, “This Has Been Really Devastating”: Inside the Lives of Incarcerated Firefighters Battling the L.A. Wildfires, L.A. Times (Jan. 17, 2025), https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-17/this-has-been-really-devastating-inside-the-lives-of-incarcerated-firefighters-battling-the-la-wildfires.
[16] Jamiles Lartey, Shannon Heffernan & Keri Blakinger, The Dangerous Yet Desirable Work of Being an Incarcerated Firefighter in California, The Marshall Project (Jan. 11, 2025), https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/01/11/los-angeles-palisades-prisoners-firefighters.
[17] Daniel Johnson, Resolution Reached Between Minnesota Prison and Inmates Who Refused to Return to Their Cells in Heat Wave, Black Enter. (Sep. 6, 2023), https://www.blackenterprise.com/stillwater-incarcerated-heatwave-cells-protests/.
[18] James Ridgeway & Jean Casella, When Summer Is Torture, Mother Jones (Jul. 27, 2010), https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2010/07/heat-wave-kills-prison-inmates/.
[19] Alyssa Fields, Judge Says Texas Prison Heat is ‘Unconstitutional,” No Change in Sight, Dall. Observer, https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/a-federal-judge-rules-on-texas-prison-heat-conditions-22072517.
[20] Vertuno, supra note 11.
[21] Jolie McCullough, After $7 Million Legal Fight over Air Conditioning, Texas Prison System Touts New Heat Safety Policies, The Tex. Trib. (Jul. 26, 2018), https://www.texastribune.org/2018/07/26/texas-prison-heat-air-conditioning-costs/.
[22] Michael Kunzelman, Louisiana Spends $1 Million to Fight Air Conditioning on Death Row, Portland press Herald (Jun. 14, 2016), https://www.pressherald.com/2016/06/13/louisiana-spends-1-million-to-fight-air-conditioning-on-death-row/.
[23] Vertuno, supra note 11.
[24] Vivienne Serret & Ames Alexander, As Heat Wave Hits, Many Inmates Lack Air Conditioning. Here’s What NC Is Doing about It., Raleigh News & Observer (Jun. 26, 2024), https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article289553268.html.
[25] Carmela Guaglianone, Do Some Arizona Prison Facilities Lack HVAC Systems?, Ariz. Ctr. for Investigative Reporting (Aug. 23, 2024), http://azcir.org/news/2024/08/23/do-some-arizona-prisons-lack-hvac-yes/.
[26] Senator Markey, Rep. Pressley Introduce Environmental Health in Prisons Act | U.S. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, (Jul. 19, 2024), https://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/senator-markey-rep-pressley-introduce-environmental-health-in-prisons-act.
[27] SIGNED INTO LAW: Sens. Ossoff, Braun, & Durbin, Reps. McBath & Armstrong’s Bipartisan Federal Prison Oversight Act | U.S. Senator for Georgia Jon Ossoff, (Jul. 25, 2024), https://www.ossoff.senate.gov/press-releases/signed-into-law-sens-ossoff-braun-durbin-reps-mcbath-armstrongs-bipartisan-federal-prison-oversight-act/.