Will Richard Linklater help save Texas prisoners from the heat?

A variation on "Dazed and Confused"

Happy almost end of summer! Yesterday, I took a long bus ride from Lençóis to Salvador in Bahía state, Brazil—blessed be the month of August between taking the bar and starting work. En route, I re-watched Bernie, Richard Linklater’s 2011 film about a small-town mortician who murders his abusive benefactress. Charming stuff. Jack Black’s performance holds up quite well; Matthew McConaughey’s is over the top, though I suppose that’s his thing.

Linklater is, without a doubt, the best director of movies about Texas. He’s also probably the best director from Texas (sorry, Wes). But my reacquaintance with his depiction of the charmingly offensive denizens of Carthage was prompted by more than mere nostalgia. (And, not to worry, though this newsletter has been a lot of things, I’m not entering the movie review business—yet.) Rather, I was curious about the real-life Bernie Tiede, who—spoiler alert—is serving a life sentence in Texas prisons and is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ).

The case—which recently survived initial attempts to dismiss—alleges that Tiede’s stroke while in custody was caused by excessive heat, in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Linklater—who developed a close relationship with Bernie, even hosting him at his house when he was briefly released—has helped bankroll, develop, and publicize the suit, which was also joined by several anti-carceral advocacy organizations. This is all strange enough to merit another movie in itself, no?

I’ve been interested in the intersections between climate justice and abolition movements for a while, which, of course, manifest in myriad ways. Some decry the environmental impacts of constructing new jails and prisons, while the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta explicitly connects efforts to preserve forestland and prevent the expansion of police training facilities. And then there are the direct climate impacts on the nearly 2 million Americans in jail or prison at any given time, who often suffer from extreme cold in the winter and extreme heat in the summer (which, by the way, keeps getting worse).

I mentioned in a previous post that California’s new indoor heat regulation will not protect those working in state prisons, including tens of thousands of guards, other staff, and incarcerated people. This is distressing, but it turns out things are even worse at the federal level because the Department of Labor and OSHA generally decline to remedy labor abuses in prisons. In combination with Clinton-era roadblocks to bringing suits against prisons, it’s unsurprising that work conditions in both state and federal prisons—especially those in the South—look an awful lot like slavery¹.

Okay, back to Bernie. His lawsuit has some good precedent to draw on: A federal district judge in Louisiana has found that forcing prisoners to work in extreme heat with “deliberate indifference” to their health and safety may violate their constitutional rights, a ruling upheld by the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. And thanks to excellent reporting and research, there is loads of evidence that TDJC, too, has acted with deliberate indifference towards sick inmates in its care, such as Tiede.

A 2022 study, for example, found that Texas’ annual prisoner death rate is 30 times the national average—4.7/1,000—much of which is likely attributable to heat; even today, only about 1/3 of Texas prison cells are air conditioned. TDJC counters, somewhat absurdly, that its heat mitigation efforts are adequate, and that it hasn’t had a heat-related death since 2012. Advocates claim that there were at least 40 such deaths in 2023 alone. Go figure.

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Despite the question up top, I don’t actually think a famous director will be able to sweep in and fix everything, though I have to commend Linklater for using his notoriety and connections to help tackle a pressing problem, alongside incarcerated Texas and long-time advocates. Impact litigation efforts are always uncertain endeavors, but I actually feel hopeful Tiede v. TDJC will yield some positive—though surely insufficient—results. As the complaint puts it: “If cooking someone to death does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment, then nothing does.” Thanks for reading e até breve!

A Slacker no more, an influential figure from my Boyhood shows us all that Before…idk, I haven’t watched those ones yet.

1. Here’s a damning passage from a great Texas Observer article:

Texas amassed 139,000 acres for prison farms. More than 50,000 acres were purchased from ex-slaveholders who had become convict-leasing profiteers. The state would develop new prison units on these lands to run its own agricultural operations with captive labor. Most of these plantation prisons sprawled across what was known as the “Sugar Bowl District,” the same southeastern counties, including Fort Bend and Brazoria, where most enslaved Texans had been exploited before emancipation.

Today, 24 Texas prison units still have agribusiness operations. Nine are located on former plantations. Incarcerated workers harvest many of the same crops that slaves and later convict laborers did from 1871 to 1910. Like the previous owners, the Texas prison system still compels captive people to work its fields without pay. Guards on horseback monitor those who labor under the sun in fields of cotton and other crops. Texas prisons were finally fully racially desegregated in 1991, but Black Texans still account for one-third of the incarcerated—nearly triple their portion of the general population. Texas is one of only seven U.S. states that pay incarcerated workers nothing.