“It's torture”: Brutal heat rages in Texas prisons and kills dozens of inmates | US prisons

When Jason Wilson was transferred to the Coffield Unit, a men's prison in Texas, in June to begin serving his sentence for illegal possession of a firearm, he was initially glad for the change of scenery. He knew the prison could be challenging in the summer due to the lack of air conditioning and the intense heat in the cells, but his previous facility had been depressing.

“It is definitely better here,” he wrote in an email to an outside lawyer.

Over the next few weeks, the tone of Wilson's emails grew more grim. It was getting hotter and hotter, and by late June he estimated it felt like 115 degrees in his cell. “I can stand the heat,” he said, “but when it gets hotter, it's not cool to just hand out water once a day.”

One day, Wilson, a 47-year-old nicknamed “Blue,” wrote at 5:53 p.m.: “Today they didn't hand out any cold water at all. This is ridiculous, this doesn't make any sense.”

One of his last emails came on July 1. “Pretty warm today…no cold water at all…it's 5:45pm…we need water as cold as it is now.”

On July 7, outside counsel Brittany Robertson received an email Wilson had written on his own account: “I need you to check on Jason Wilson immediately. I don't think this is good.”

She called the prison and learned that guards had done a physical on the prisoner and that he was fine. While she was on the phone, she received a message from Wilson's father.

Jason died in his cell two days earlier, on July 5, he said.

Robertson asked the prison officer why she had been told that Wilson was fine when in fact his body had been in the morgue for 48 hours.

The officer replied, “I was just doing what I was told.”

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Jason Wilson's death was raised last week in a four-day hearing in federal court in Austin, Texas, where the state Department of Corrections is being sued for subjecting inmates to cruel and unusual punishments prohibited by the U.S. Constitution. The lawsuit begins bluntly with the statement: “Texas prisoners are being boiled to death.”

With Texas set to reach its summer high in the next few days, the lawsuit says prisoners are facing daily heat of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. On average, 14 people die each year from extreme heat in their cells, the plaintiffs say – a figure the state disputes.

The lawsuit seeks to force the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) to equip all prisons with air conditioning. Currently, about two-thirds of them are not equipped with air conditioning. As a result, an estimated 85,000 inmates in dozens of correctional facilities are at risk of heat stroke, exhaustion, nausea and other heat-related ailments, or even death.

The lead plaintiff in the case is Bernie Tiede, a former undertaker serving a 99-year prison sentence for the murder of his partner, an 81-year-old widow. Tiede's story was captured in the 2011 film Bernie, a black comedy directed by Richard Linklater and starring Jack Black.

Tiede testified at the hearing, telling the court he suffered a stroke last year while in a prison without air conditioning. He was brought into the courtroom in shackles, with his face visibly drooping to one side as a result of the stroke, the Texas Newsroom reported.

“You would be arrested if you treated a dog like that,” Tiede testified.

Linklater, who lives in Texas, visited Tiede in prison last year and managed to secretly film him on his cellphone. The director said he was shocked by what he saw.

“The man had one side of his face frozen, the heat had just knocked him out. It was really sad and depressing. As I left that day, I thought, 'Is this the last time I see Bernie alive? Am I watching the state slowly kill him?'”

Linklater's smartphone recordings were played at the Federal Court hearing. He said the trial finally addressed a crisis that had dragged on for decades.

“This is torture, it's madness, it's a violation of the Constitution. And they keep getting away with it. But I think Texas has finally met its match this time – the arguments are so compelling,” Linklater said.

He added: “I can't believe that people are so inhumane. Eighty thousand people are tortured for four months a year. This is absolutely avoidable in the modern world.”

At the hearing, State Prison Service Director Bryan Collier blamed a lack of funds for the failure to resolve the heating problem. “It's not an easy fix,” he said, telling the court that much more money would need to be released to cover the cost of installing air conditioning throughout the prison system.

Texas currently has $33 billion in reserves.

The TDCJ denies that there have been any heat-related deaths since 2012, insisting that deaths during the summer months can be explained by inmates' underlying medical conditions. However, Collier acknowledged that extreme heat contributed to the deaths of three inmates during the brutal heat wave that hit Texas last year.

One of the deceased, Elizabeth Hagerty, 37, died in June 2023, just days before her scheduled release. Outside temperatures were above 100 degrees at the time, and she was battling heat rash and having difficulty breathing.

She had hung a sign in her air-conditioned cell that read, “Please give me water.” It was ignored.

The Texas Newsroom obtained autopsy reports from the three prisoners. Another of them, 32-year-old John Castillo, was found to have a core body temperature of 108°F (42°C) at the time of his death.

Robertson, who was in contact with Wilson by email before his death, works with Texas Prisons Community Advocates, one of the plaintiffs in the case. She said at the hearing that conditions in many state prisons were so bad this summer that inmates lit fires to lure guards into their ranks to care for ailing prisoners who collapsed in the heat.

At Coffield, inmates were forced to spend up to six hours in the courtyard, known as the day room. This room is intended to provide prisoners with peace and quiet outside their cells, but has become a heat trap because there is no air conditioning or access to water.

Robertson's research suggests Wilson spent up to five hours in the day room before collapsing in his cell. A TDCJ spokesman declined to comment on Wilson's death, saying the department “does not comment on ongoing litigation.”

Presiding Judge Robert Pitman has given both sides until August 20 to present their closing arguments, but has not yet given a time for his decision.

Until that happens, the fate of thousands of Texas prisoners remains.

“It's summer in Texas and death is here,” Anthony Hanby wrote in an open letter to the Guardian. “Extreme heat threatens my life every day now. Some days the water came so late that I was in a paralyzing delirium when it arrived. I've had days when it didn't come at all and I chose to die screaming outside my door rather than wait for the heat to kill me.”

Hanby wrote the letter from Coffield, where Wilson died, describing the conditions as “heat torture – people are killed in Texas every year who are not sentenced to death.”

The prisoner was kept “in a tiny cell with sheet metal on the door 24 hours a day.” He has high blood pressure and fears he won't make it.

“If I don't survive this summer, TDCJ will use his favorite excuse and say I died of a heart attack,” he wrote. “That will be a lie. It will be the heat that takes me, and if not me, then so many others like me.”