It doesn’t matter what part of the United States you call home these days – lately, it’s been hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Here in the District, a 94-year-old record was recently shattered after D.C. recorded four consecutive days over 101 degrees, including one sweltering day when the thermometer climbed to 104 degrees for the first time since July 2012.
With 50% of Americans living in cities in which officials have issued heat alerts, people are desperately looking for all kinds of ways to stay cool and to avoid medical complications related to the excessive heat.
For young children and the elderly, this is a particularly dangerous time because of their weaker immune systems or because they are burdened with underlying health conditions that put them at greater risk of falling prey to heat-related illnesses – even death.
However, there is one segment of our population – often overlooked and routinely forgotten – that has few, if any, means of protection from the surging temperatures or other unprecedented “natural disasters” that have become more commonplace due to the ravaging power of climate change.
These forgotten Americans are those who live behind bars – youth housed in juvenile detention centers and adult men and women who are residents in our nation’s profit-making prison industrial complex.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the U.S., with an estimated 1.8 million people behind bars at the end of 2023, bears the unenviable status as the nation with the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. China closely follows America with about 100,000 fewer incarcerated adults.
For African Americans, the picture is even more grim. While Black people represent just 12% of the population, they account for 59.3% of those incarcerated according to the Office of Minority Health. Further, African Americans are incarcerated at a rate 3.4 times that of white Americans, based on 2021 data, in every state in the Union. And make no mistake – racial disparities which Black people are forced to endure in American society continue to persist in U.S. jails.
Still, those who currently reside in detention centers, jails and prisons in America are, to a certain extent, inextricably bound together. They cannot escape their surroundings, nor can they take a brief hiatus or temporary holiday. Prison populations are uniquely and unjustly vulnerable to climate externalities like rising temperatures and increasingly severe natural disasters. In addition, they remain at high risk for heat-related morbidity and mortality because of their physical confinement, social isolation and high rates of chronic mental and physical illnesses.
As Americans turn up their air conditioners, leisurely lounge in swimming pools, or recline in cooling centers, the incarcerated face each day with few, if any options, that allow them to avoid the byproducts of climate change: heat, floods, pests, disease and death.
Again, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, at least 44 states do not universally air condition their prisons. In fact, some inmates describe the tiny cells in which they live, sometimes for 23 hours a day, as “convection ovens.”
To stay cool or to simply get a drink of water, some inmates have been forced to put their heads in unsanitary toilets or moisten strips of clothing in those same toilets and then place the items on their heads and faces.
In states that include Texas, Alabama and Florida, man’s inhumanity to man is on full display as prison officials refuse to provide any reasonable or humane methods to protect inmates from the heat. And while these states, reportedly, have the money to make changes that would improve conditions, they refuse to do so – some even asserting that such actions would be tantamount to “pampering prisoners.”
To support their claim and actions – or perhaps more accurately, inactions – officials often point to the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
America, we need to wake up and get involved. The incarcerated need us, as John Lewis said, to get into “good trouble.”
While we understand that people are sent to prison as punishment for crimes they have committed, they should not be unduly tortured while paying their debt to society.