Charles Rotter
On September 26, Futurism ran a piece by Joe Wilkins headlined “Climate Change Is Turning Prisons Full of Human Beings Into Industrial-Scale Air Fryers.” He gives two examples, Italy and Texas. In both, the prisons have no air conditioning.
In Italy, for example, record summer heat has turned hundreds of detention centers into de facto torture chambers. As the New York Times reports, temperatures inside prison cells across the Italian peninsula have regularly exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit, choking detainees, staff and visitors alike.
Because Italy’s 200-some carceral centers lack air conditioning, let alone basic fans and ventilation systems, the unprecedented heat has placed a “significant strain on correctional facilities, exacerbating pre-existing logistical problems,” according to a report by Italian prison watchdog Antigone.
That’s on top of Italy’s ongoing crisis of prison overcrowding — according to the NYT, the country has almost 65,000 inmates held in custody, despite a housing capacity of 47,000.
https://futurism.com/science-energy/climate-change-prisons-incarceration
Italy’s prisons were crowded long before this summer. In 2010 the government declared a state of emergency over overcrowding, when the system held 67,961 prisoners, about 151% of capacity. In January 2013 the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Torreggiani and Others v. Italy that the overcrowding was inhuman and degrading treatment, and that the problem was structural. Italy had more prisoners in 2010 than it has today.
Futurism’s next paragraph supplies the cause itself.
Unfortunately, relief seems unlikely, both in the immediate-term and in the hot years ahead. As head of Italy’s penitentiary administration department Stefano Carmine De Michele admitted in a July press conference, air conditioning isn’t even “being considered” for the country’s prisons.
That is a decision made by the people who run the prisons.
That would probably be the route the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) would prefer to take. Instead, the agency is being ordered to install air conditioning throughout the states’ detention facilities — though not until 2029 — after a federal judge ruled that the current lack of air conditioning constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, the Texas Tribune reported.
“In the face of clear evidence of risk — including ongoing injuries, deaths, and suffering every summer — [TDCJ] Director Lumpkin’s failure to enact a meaningful, committed plan to install air-conditioning on the timeline that TDCJ has repeatedly indicated is possible is deliberate indifference,” the presiding judge declared.
As the Tribune notes, an estimated 23 people have died from heat-related causes between 1998 and 2012 in Texas custody, in addition to 10 deaths from 2022 and 2025. It remains to be seen whether the TDCJ will honor the federally-mandated timeline, but as record-breaking summer heat becomes the norm, the situation for those in custody has become far too urgent.
The Texas Tribune story Futurism leans on says more than Futurism does. Just over a third of the state’s 104 prison facilities were fully air conditioned as of September 1, which leaves nearly 90,000 inmates without it. Bills requiring climate control in state prisons have failed in several sessions, and lawmakers declined to spend budget surpluses on it, while state law already requires county jails to be kept between 65 and 85 degrees. TDCJ puts the cost of cooling everything at $1.5 billion.
TDCJ has acknowledged that at least 23 people died from heat-related causes in its facilities between 1998 and 2012 — a likely underestimate, Pitman wrote in his order last year. Inmate advocates say at least 10 additional deaths between 2022 and 2025 can be attributed to the high temperatures, including three people whose autopsy reports reference heat as a possible contributing factor.
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/09/22/texas-prison-air-conditioning-lawsuit-ruling
Futurism gives the 23 deaths from 1998 to 2012 without saying when they happened. Ten of them came in a single summer, 2011, according to U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison’s ruling in the Larry McCollum case. McCollum died of heat stroke at the Hutchins State Jail seven days after he arrived.
Futurism closes by warning that record-breaking summers are becoming the norm. Texas’s record summer is still 2011. State climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon put the statewide June–August average that year at 86.8°F. Summer 2023 came second at 85.3°F.
The prisons aren’t spread evenly across the state, so I looked at the counties where the 2011 deaths clustered. NOAA keeps June–August temperature records for every Texas county back to 1895. Walker County holds Huntsville and its cluster of state prisons. Anderson County holds the Gurney unit outside Palestine, one of the two units the 2012 wrongful-death suits singled out.
The afternoon high has no trend at all over 132 years. The ten summers from 2016 to 2025 averaged 93.6°F, and the summers of 1901 to 1930 averaged 93.6°F. The summer nights are where the change shows up. The average low for 2016–2025 was 73.5°F, against 72.1°F for 1901–1930.
Anderson County is the same story, only more so. The trend in summer highs since 1895 is slightly negative. The hottest summer highs on its list besides 2011 are 1925, 1998, 1934 and 1954. Summer lows are up about a degree per century.
Afternoons that haven’t warmed and nights that have is the pattern you get from development around the thermometers, more than from anything happening to the sun or the sky.
Judge Pitman found credible evidence of at least nine heat deaths from 2023 to 2025, about three a year, higher than the 1998–2012 average. The older figure was TDCJ’s own count, which Pitman called a likely underestimate. The recent one comes out of a lawsuit with people reading autopsy reports.
The men who died in 2011 died in buildings without air conditioning. Most of the system still doesn’t have it. Pitman gave Texas until December 31, 2029. Texas filed its appeal on October 12.
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Temperature data: NOAA NCEI Climate at a Glance, county time series, June–August maximum and minimum temperature, Walker County (TX-471), and maximum and minimum temperature, Anderson County (TX-001).
