Put to a nicety, Texas summers are ugly. They’re uglier in some regions of the state than others, but in their way just as ugly. I grew up in Houston, a coastal area about sixty miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. It’s part of southeast Texas and the southern Gulf Coast, along with places like New Orleans, Biloxi, Mobile, and Tampa. This means that summer is always the first one to arrive and the last to leave.
By early May we’re sitting on the front porch drinking iced tea (or cold beer) by the gallon, trying to beat the heat. Most years we’ll still have the AC stroking well into October. By 7:30 AM it’ll be 98°F with 98% humidity outside. In layman’s terms, it’s too hot outside to even fucking breathe. In East Texas, there is nothing outside of your living room if it doesn’t involve water: ocean, lake, swimming pool, creek, or mud puddle. Most people don’t realize just how beastly hot Houston is until they spend a summer there.
Other parts of the state are just as hot, or hotter. Yet without the intense humidity levels of the coastal plains region it may seem milder. Many older homes in the northeastern U.S. and upper Midwest do not have central air conditioning because of the fairly mild climate (I realize that to someone sweltering through the heat of a New York City summer it doesn’t feel so mild. But to someone from Texas, Louisiana, or Mississippi it’s absolutely balmy.) In this part of the country, central AC is not a luxury. It’s as vital as oxygen. People die without it.
Which brings me to the point of this whole thing. (I know. I kinda took the long way.) Summertime in prison. In a word, it’s a bitch. Historically, Texas’s philosophy, like a lot of the southern Gulf Coast, regarding crime and punishment has been about physical/mental endurance, obedience, hard labor, and deprivation. The idea was not to reform (or, at least not in the way we think of reformation today), but to make your prison experience so brutal that you would do literally almost anything to avoid returning. Well, we see that didn’t work so well, so it was off to Plan B. And from where I’m sitting it doesn’t look like the Plan B crowd is having much luck either.
What this means is that some of these old prisons have been around for more than a century. These old camps have had central AC installed in places like the warden’s office, the infirmary, and the chapel, but certainly not in any of the cellblocks. So, when you went to breakfast in the morning it was seasoned with sweat, and when you went to bed at night your sheets were scented with sweat. And during those times in between, you sweated.
The heat is every bit as bad, in some ways worse, for the cops working these areas. For example, when we’re on the wing, and whatever we’re doing, we never stray too far from our fans. The cops don’t have this small luxury. They’re busy running to and fro, doing cop-type things, making the world safe for democracy. And sweating their asses off. Some units will pass out ice. But in this heat, even that relief is short-lived.
Things, however, began to change post-1999. A little. ’99 was the summer that a major heat wave came roaring through Texas like a rabid lion, savaging everything–and everyone–in its path. We had over 33 straight days of 100-plus degree weather. So, where it may have been, say, 105° outside, it was about 115° in the building. In the wake of that heat wave, several bodies were left floating around the system. The lack of poor ventilation and air circulation in these buildings resulted in fatal heat strokes. Maybe Brian Collier (Executive Director of TDC) knows how many lawsuits ensued because of these preventable fatalities, but ole Slay doesn’t.
Let us not say, however, that nothing positive resulted from this tragedy. The ’99 heat wave and resulting lawsuits became the primary change agent responsible for heralding in a new era in TDC. Large industrial-sized fans began being spotted hanging over the runs and day rooms. Only a few at first, but more as time went by. I left the Wynne Unit (an extremely old, Victorian era prison) in Huntsville in late 2020 and there must’ve been at least forty fans hanging from the wall above the runs. While these fans didn’t do much in the way of cooling the house, there was a noticeable difference in the temperature when you stepped outside of it.
Today there are “respite” areas on most, if not all, of these old prisons where an inmate can go to cool down (a respite area being an air conditioned room, usually located in a designated part of the prison like the schoolhouse, the infirmary, or the chapel), and cool-down showers have been instituted during the summer months at many farms.
The “new” units, like the one I’m at right now (this one opened in 1992)–basically units opened post-1987–have air conditioning. If you’re in the general population, however, probably the only time you’re going to experience it is if you go to sick-call or church. They also have it in Ad Seg (Administrative Segregation, like solitary), and they even have it turned on, though how much of it or how well you feel it can be sporadic. That is to say, the air flow as well as the temperature can vary significantly from wing to wing, section to section, and even cell to cell.
On these newer units, TDC [Texas Dept. of Corrections] is beginning to house more and more people with a designated “heat restriction” in their medical file. I have been hearing TDC implementing this, and even seeing it somewhat, for just over three years, but as yet the transition is incomplete. What this means to us, as well as our families and others who love us, is that a person stands a better chance of withstanding a heat-related illness at a unit of this design (mainly if he or she is in ad. seg.) than does another doing time at one of the old “red brick” prisons. But still, there are no guarantees in TDC. I’m not certain that the Agency even wants to eradicate the heat problems down here. At least not completely. It’s my opinion, and my belief, that they want to keep enough of it hanging around to see us intensely uncomfortable, but not so much that they get sued.
It is more difficult to do time in extreme heat than in the winter. People are easily frustrated, quick to anger, and quicker to react. Intense heat is another way that TDC can keep us at each other’s throats over, many times, seemingly trivial issues and not so much concentrate on the fuckery the Agency is serving up.
In closing, however, as in opening, Texas summers are a bitch. I can’t wait for November. I should’ve been from St. Paul, y’all. Stay cool, amigos.
