“It’s Like I Won the Lottery”: The Case for Cooling America’s Prisons
At six in the morning inside Missouri’s Algoa Correctional Center, Jeremy Hann woke to lights flickering on and sheets soaked in sweat. His sink barely worked. The single fan in the hallway gave no relief.
“I finally fall asleep by counting the water droplets as they drip into my sink,” he wrote for The Marshall Project. Later, when officers handed out cups of ice, it felt “like Christmas.” By afternoon, the ice was gone. “How can this be legal?” he asked.
Hann's question cuts to the heart of a national failure. As summers grow hotter, incarceration in the United States has quietly become a climate-change crisis. Across the country, states confine people in concrete buildings with no air conditioning and insufficient water; however, there are still no national standards to prevent heat illness and death behind bars.
Legally, the neglect occupies a gray zone. Courts rule inconsistently on whether extreme heat violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. As a result, incarcerated people throughout the United States are subjected to unendurable conditions that violate basic constitutional rights.
Congress could close this gap by requiring heat safety plans in all facilities that receive federal funding. This approach reproduces other successful public health strategies where federal funding incentives have shifted institutional priorities without imposing direct control.
A 2023 study found that for every 10 degrees above 90°F, total mortality in prisons increased by five percent. Chronic conditions, aging, disability, and use of medications that impair the body’s ability to regulate temperature all compound these effects and heighten susceptibility to heat-related illness and death. Without adequate cooling, a vulnerable population is left even more at risk of potentially lethal conditions.
At its root, it's an environmental justice crisis. Black and Latino people make up 56 percent of the prison population but only 32 percent of the U.S. population. Many come from urban heat islands—neighborhoods made up to 12.6 degrees hotter by decades of racist housing policy and underinvestment. The system that overincarcerated these communities now locks them in oppressive conditions, subjecting them to heat inequity twice: once in their neighborhoods, and again behind bars.
Arguments against cooling prisons are predictable and, on the surface, understandable. Retrofitting decades-old facilities, for one, sounds expensive — Texas claimed that installing permanent air-conditioning in the Pack Unit could cost over $20 million, according to the Texas Tribune. Beneath fiscal arguments lies little political momentum in the state’s legislature to address climate control in prisons. This raises the question of who deserves comfort and safety at the expense of taxpayers. But Texas quickly learned that neglect costs more than air conditioning. The state spent over $7 million before ultimately settling and installing cooling for less than $4 million—a fraction of the initial estimate and legal fees spent resisting the air units. Dozens of other heat-related lawsuits since 2011 have cost the state millions more. As extreme heat risk spreads, the cost of inaction must take into account the number of preventable heat-related illnesses and deaths. States can either pay upfront for prevention or spend far more on litigation and settlement payouts later.
And air-conditioning isn’t the only solution. Low-cost options such as shade in recreation yards, mandatory water breaks, hydration checks, and real-time heat alerts can be implemented immediately and provide some remediation. These interventions already protect outdoor workers and athletes. People in custody and the officers who guard them deserve the same basic protection.
Where Texas stalls, New York City shows what a proactive, holistic response might look like. In May 2025, the Department of Corrections activated its annual heat action plan, known as the BOLD Action Plan, which prioritizes clinically designated heat-sensitive individuals for placement in air-conditioned housing. As of May 8, 2025, 59 percent were housed in air-conditioned units, with over 80 percent of heat-sensitive individuals in cooled areas. Staff conduct daily temperature monitoring, and facilities without full climate control use industrial fans and scheduled ice deliveries.
While the city’s infrastructure limits full air-conditioning across its aging facilities, the BOLD Action Plan demonstrates how correctional systems can integrate medical and operational safeguards into a coordinated response. Its clinical protocols and communications plans offer a model for how systems could standardize transparent correctional heat management.
Jeremy Hann pressed a cold rag to his chest, dreading the night to come. “It’s hard to breathe,” he wrote. “I just hope it cools down soon.”
No one should have to rely on hope to stay alive. Mandating heat safety standards is basic governance in a warming world—one that recognizes safety as a shared responsibility. Federal legislation conditioning funding on compliance with heat safety would both save lives and taxpayer dollars.
When the next heat wave hits, the question should not be “How can this be legal?” It should be “Why didn’t we act sooner?”