What will it take to enforce heat rights in prison?

On one of many cruel and usual features of our punishment system

Happy spring time to the friends, family, and few brave strangers here! With summer on the horizon, I want to return to a topic I’ve touched on a couple of times before: the struggle for incarcerated people to not be killed by extreme heat. As you may recall, California came very close last year to becoming the first state with an indoor heat standard protecting workers in its prisons and jail, until a certain governor with presidential ambitions (and right-wing podcast host?) stepped in. So, tens of thousands of incarcerated people and state staff continue to labor without guaranteed access to air conditioning, breaks, or water in climate-vulnerable parts of California. According to a study from UCLA and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights:

18 of the state’s 33 prisons are at risk due to extreme weather, and that more than two-thirds of the prisons are within 5 miles of areas Cal Fire has identified as high risk for wildfires. […] Sixty-one percent of respondents said they experienced heat exhaustion while incarcerated.

A coalition led by Worksafe and Legal Services for Prisoners with Children recently presented to California’s occupational safety and health standards board on the continuing need to fix this exception. But the regulators’ hands may continue to be tied, at least through our 2026 gubernatorial election.

This problem isn’t limited to California, of course, nor just to working hours. As Kwaneta Harris explained on a recent episode of This American Life¹:

There isn’t air conditioning in our prison building in Texas. It gets so hot in the summer that Coke cans will just spontaneously explode; toothpaste liquefies. In June 2019, I fainted from the heat, and the sergeant took the temperature in my cell that day: 129 degrees.

Per the Dallas Observer, Texas is one of 13 states that does not require air conditioning in its state prisons.

Texas and Florida alone account for over half of all exposures to dangerous levels of heat across all carceral facilities in the United States, while across the South incarceration rates are rising along with temperatures. Still—on top of locking up people of color at disproportionate rates—we remain fond of imprisoning the mentally ill and keeping people behind bars until they are elderly, both risk factors which heighten susceptibility to heat-related illness.

Given this bleak outlook (a shocker for this newsletter, I know), I wanted to learn more about what can be done to force even a modicum of climate justice into these peculiar institutions via our best vehicle for defending democracy and the dispossessed: the federal judiciary! (*Scattered applause*)

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I previously wrote about Richard Linklater’s quest to free Bernie Tiede—the titular inspiration for his 2011 film—from dangerously hot cell conditions in Huntsville, Texas. Just last week, a federal judge in Austin ruled that Mr. Tiede has been denied his Eighth Amendment rights, though stopped short of ordering (yet) that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice do anything.²

Of course, most prison conditions suits do not attract the attention of Hollywood and are filed pro se, without outside legal counsel.³ Even so, it is common for judges across the country and ideological spectrum to conclude that forcing sick people to live in cramped infernos is cruel and unusual. Lawsuits are too often deathly slow, though. How slow, you ask? Well…

Consider an ongoing case in Nevada, Lyons v. Russell, in which a man serving a life sentence has sued his warden and other prison staff for confining him and other wheelchair-bound prisoners in an open field on a 100+ degree day in July 2021. William Lyons claims that he suffered burns and cancerous sores due to this exposure, which went untreated for months. Reading the whole complaint—handwritten and filed in September 2023 by another incarcerated man with impressive legal skills—is powerful, and I’m grateful to a friend who, let’s say, regularly reads such documents for pointing me towards this case.

As is common in federal cases, the docket for the first year and a half or so of Lyons v. Russell is filled with the parties going back and forth on a number of important procedural matters: required filing fees, appointment of counsel, adding and subtracting litigants, case management conferences, discovery and mediation, class action certification, etc. On most of these motions, Mr. Lyons lost. Finally, in January 2025 the court permitted pro bono counsel to be appointed, so there is a chance that—nearly four years after the inciting incident—the merits of Mr. Lyons’ case may soon begin to be adjudicated.

Even if Mr. Lyons had access to an experienced plaintiffs’ lawyer from the beginning, though, his lawsuit would still have been an uphill battle. State correctional officers sued in their official capacity for constitutional violations have various defenses available, which read like the syllabus from a Federal Courts class: sovereign immunity, the ever-shrinking Ex Parte Young exceptions, and limits on relief in Section 1983 cases which often result in only “modest heat mitigation efforts, and rarely to long-term solutions.”

Proving an Eighth Amendment violation itself is difficult, too. The current test from the Supreme Court requires both that 1) a condition or practice pose a substantial risk of harm to an inmate’s health, and 2) that correctional officers acted with deliberate indifference to that substantial risk. At least in the context of heat risks, subjective awareness may at least be inferred if officials are on notice of excessive heat or humidity and fail to take reasonable measures in response. Yet you can still see the slipperiness.

Finally, the Clinton-era Prison Litigation Reform Act makes it needlessly difficult for incarcerated people to challenge the conditions of their confinement, in part by raising the costs of filing litigation from prisons and capping recoverable fees by even successful litigants on the back end.

Taken together, it is not surprising that—to my knowledge—no court has ever ordered a jail or prison system to substantially overall its environmental control measures, despite numerous findings that people incarcerated around the country are routinely subjected to unconstitutional conditions. There’s an argument about reform vs. abolition lurking in here that I don’t have the means of getting into as I scramble to finish this on a Sunday morning. But I think it is clear, at least, that taking this aspect of the climate crisis to the courts is necessary, yet insufficient, to improve—and even save—the lives of the likes of Kwaneta Harris, Bernie Tiede, and William Lyons.

Thank you for reading my monthly missive! I’m open as always to more ideas :)

1. Ms. Harris’ moving story begins at 28 minutes; this quote is from 41:50. She also has a Substack, infinitely more worth your time than this middling effort.

2. This is reminiscent of the California debacle described above, where the billions of dollars it would take to make the state’s carceral facilities more livable proved a budgetary non-starter. Bernie’s case has, however, inspired efforts to force a fix legislatively, though that seems like a long shot in a state set on preventing even non-incarcerated workers from taking water breaks.

3. I’m reminded here of an infamous moment in my first year Civil Procedure class. The professor—with whom I may or may not share a name—described his appellate clerkship, as law professors are wont to do. In so doing, he complained about having to spend a lot of his time in chambers dismissing “frivolous” prison conditions litigation. He later explained that concerns about prison conditions are not, by and large, frivolous, merely the efforts of those subject such conditions to gain remedy through filing on their own behalf in the courts.