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Associated Press
17-07-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
Most Texas prisoners don't have AC access and it's unclear when they will get it
Two thirds of people incarcerated in Texas' prisons face another summer without air conditioning after lawmakers again declined to pass legislation that would mandate a timeline for installing climate control in state facilities. After years of promises from state officials that resulted in modest progress and a federal judge who has ruled Texas' prison heat conditions unconstitutional but declined to force any changes, tens of thousands of people incarcerated in the state do not know if they will see air conditioning anytime soon. 'During this triple digit summer, approximately 88,000 individuals in Texas prisons do not have air conditioning,' said Amite Dominick, founder and president of Texas Prisons Community Advocates. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice currently has 48,372 cooled living areas across its facilities, providing climate control to roughly a third of the 137,778 people incarcerated in the state's prisons, as of June 30, according to agency spokesperson Amanda Hernandez. Bryan Collier, executive director of TDCJ, has repeatedly called adding air conditioning to Texas' prisons his top priority. However, Collier has never committed the agency to a definitive timeline for installing climate control across the system absent the passage of legislation that would provide more than a billion dollars for the effort. At the current rate of installing air conditioning, it would take 25 years to climate control Texas' prisons 'on the most generous timeline,' according to U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in a March ruling. Complicating TDCJ's future commitment to solving the issue, Collier is retiring Aug. 31 and the nine-member Texas Board of Criminal Justice is tasked with appointing his replacement. 'Despite knowing of the risk extreme heat poses to all inmates and the inadequacy of TDCJ's mitigation measures, Collier has no concrete timeline for installing permanent or temporary air conditioning in TDCJ inmate living areas,' wrote Pitman. Indoor temperatures routinely exceed 100 degrees, and court records show hundreds of incarcerated people have been diagnosed with heat-related illnesses. According to Pitman's ruling, 'TDCJ has admitted that at least 23 individuals died in TDCJ facilities from heat-related causes between 1998 and 2012' and 'Collier admitted he was aware of 10 deaths from heat stroke in the summer of 2011 alone.' Asked when TDCJ would air condition all its facilities, Hernandez declined to answer the question 'due to pending litigation.' TDCJ received $85 million from the state in 2023 and an additional $118 million this year to build air conditioning, but it has never formally bid out the cost of installing air conditioning throughout all its facilities, according to court testimony from TDCJ Facilities Director Ronald Hudson last year. Hernandez again cited pending litigation and declined to answer whether TDCJ had bid out the cost of air conditioning for all its facilities in the time since. 'The fundamental issue is, how can they give any estimate as to the amount of time it'll take or how much it'll cost, without soliciting bids for air conditioning the entire system?' said Kevin Homiak, partner and pro bono chair at Wheeler Trigg O'Donnell, who represents incarcerated people in the federal lawsuit. TDCJ accelerates construction, but judge seeks more TDCJ has completed 2,902 air-conditioned beds using the $85 million appropriated in 2023 and plans to finish another 12,827 within 18 months, according to Hernandez. The agency has now 'expensed or obligated' all that funding, up from just $13 million at the start of this year. This legislative session, lawmakers appropriated an additional $118 million that Hernandez said the agency estimates will fund 18,000 more beds, while declining to provide a timeline for completion. So far, 2,378 of those beds are waiting for vendors to submit construction bids, while 15,798 beds are in the design phase, Hernandez said. The funding from the Legislature has corresponded with a significant shift in pace for TDCJ, which has more than doubled its rate of building cooled living areas in recent years. Court documents and archives of its online tracker show the agency built fewer than 1,000 cooled beds annually between 2018 and 2021, but built 6,700 beds between 2022-2023. Since 2023, TDCJ has averaged building over 3,000 beds per year. Despite this acceleration, Pitman challenged the agency's commitment in his March ruling, scrutinizing whether TDCJ has devoted adequate resources to addressing the crisis. 'Although TDCJ has a multi-billion-dollar budget, it has allocated only $115.5 million to installing air conditioning in TDCJ units since 2018,' Pitman wrote. Advocates remain skeptical of TDCJ's progress, pointing to the large number of incarcerated people who continue to live without air conditioning or an understanding of when they may receive it. 'That's little but nothing, that's minuscule,' said Dominick of the roughly 3,000 beds so far completed using the money appropriated in 2023. TDCJ sets own timeline as advocates await ruling Without legislative mandates or judicial orders, TDCJ sets its own timeline for installing air conditioning using funds from a general maintenance budget. Dominick said this approach allows the agency to 'maintain control and power' over the pace of installation. TDCJ cites design challenges as the main bottleneck to building air conditioning. Hernandez said the major holdup is designing for different cell types and the difficulty of building in older facilities, some of which date to the 1800s. 'Once we have the blueprint in place for adding air conditioning to a standard facility type… we can bid those out and build them more quickly,' she said. TDCJ's pace of building has raised questions about the agency's cost estimates and construction capabilities. In his 2024 federal court testimony, Hudson acknowledged that because the agency has never formally bid out the cost of installing air conditioning throughout all its facilities, its cost estimates at that time were 'pie-in-the-sky.' TDCJ's credibility on cost estimates has been questioned before. During a 2017 federal case involving the Wallace Pack Unit, the agency's cost projections for building air conditioning dropped from more than $20 million to $11 million after recalculation, with actual installation costs totaling less than $4 million. Prison air conditioning has not been added to the summer 2025 special session agenda. So, absent extraordinary legislative action, advocates hope relief comes either from TDCJ stepping up its rate of building air conditioning or Pitman ruling on a definite timeline for the installation of air conditioning through the jury trial in March 2026, the next major step in the ongoing federal civil rights case. 'When I initially chose what our organization was going to focus on with limited resources, I purposely didn't choose legal because I thought it was going to take longer,' said Dominick. 'I believe I was naive at the time.' ___ This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Yahoo
TDCJ Executive Director announces retirement
(FOX 44) – Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) Executive Director Bryan Collier has announced his retirement, effective August 31. TDCJ says this comes following a long career of public service. Collier assumed the role of Executive Director on August 1, 2016. In addition to guiding the agency through Hurricane Harvey and COVID-19, TDCJ says Collier's leadership was instrumental in decreasing the recidivism rate to one of the lowest in the country, coordination with State's leadership to secure significant pay raises for correctional staff and parole officers, and investing in the rehabilitation and reentry of those incarcerated. Under Collier's leadership, the agency embraced innovation, broke ground on a new state-of-the-art training facility, issued tablets to more than 130,000 inmates, and implemented transformative programs such as the Field Minister and Life Coach approaches to peer support, and the STRIVE inmate self-improvement curriculum. TDCJ says Collier has held a wide variety of positions during his 40 years of service to the agency. These include clerk, correctional officer, parole officer, section director, parole division director, deputy executive director, and executive director. Collier has a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminology and Corrections from Sam Houston State University. He is a member of the American Correctional Association (ACA), serving on the Board of Governors, Vice President, and as Vice-Chair of the Performance-Based Standards Committee. TDCJ says Collier has received numerous awards – including ACA's Best in the Business Award, Correctional Leaders Association (CLA) Edward R. Cass Correctional Achievement Award, CLA Michael Francke Career Achievement Award, and Dr. George J. Beto Hall of Honor Award. The Executive Director is appointed by the nine-member Texas Board of Criminal Justice. Chairman Nichols says the TDCJ the board has started the process of appointing a new executive director. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Texas House advances bill requiring A/C in prisons; proposal's fate uncertain in Senate
The Texas House overwhelmingly passed legislation Thursday night to require air conditioning across the state's prison system, marking the third time in five years that the lower chamber has approved such a measure. The Senate has declined to take it up in the previous two sessions. The 89-43 vote comes less than two months after an Austin federal judge declared extreme heat in Texas prisons to be 'plainly unconstitutional' and warned lawmakers that he expects to order the state to install permanent air-conditioning systemwide. It also took place hours before a midnight cutoff for the House to pass bills originating in that chamber. House Bill 3006 is expected to face an uphill battle in the more conservative state Senate, which has repeatedly declined to hear similar proposals. Democratic state Rep. Terry Canales of Edinburg, a criminal defense attorney, said he filed the bill because the constant, sweltering heat in lockups is 'inhumane' and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. 'Many people are not violent offenders,' he told the American-Statesman. 'They surely didn't get sentenced to death. But we're killing them. We're cooking people.' Over 60% of Texas inmates are being held on violent offenses, 15% on drug-related offenses and 9% on property offenses. The average prisoner is 41 years old, according to Texas 2036, a center-right policy think tank. Texas Department of Criminal Justice Director Bryan Collier has acknowledged that heat was a factor in three inmates' deaths from multiple causes in 2023. Prison guards and staff members also continue to fall ill from heat exposure, and the system struggled with a turnover rate of 26% in 2023, one of the hottest years in recent Texas history. HB 3006 outlines a three-phased approach that would require TDCJ to install climate control in one-third of its facilities by 2028, another one-third by 2030 and the final third of the facilities by 2032 — but only if it receives the funds to do so. The agency would be mandated to solicit competitive bids from private contractors to complete the project, and the cost would be capped at $100 million per phase. Canales described visiting the minimum-security prison in his hometown on a broiling Texas summer day, where the odor of male sweat is so strong that 'you can taste it' and where prisoners flood their cells with toilet water, then 'take turns lying in it' overnight to cool down. In a yearslong legal battle over the climate control in Texas prisons, plaintiffs are asking the court to require the state to maintain cell temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees, a similar range as Texas jails and federal prisons are required to maintain. Nearly 70% of cells in the state prison system lack air conditioning, according to a court filing in the lawsuit. On the state's current trajectory, it would take at least 25 years to ensure all cells are climate-controlled, which is "insufficient under the Eight Amendment," U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman found in his March ruling on a request for a preliminary injunction. Pitman urged Collier to prepare for an adverse final ruling that would require Texas to air-condition all cells, and he recently scheduled a jury trial for March 2026. TDCJ has installed nearly 48,000 "cool beds" in its system so far and is in the process of procuring 12,000 more. The agency received $85 million for additional air conditioning installation in 2023 and is requesting another $118 million for the next bieennium, which it says would allow for 16,000 more air-conditioned beds. That would bring the total number to 78,000 in a system that housed nearly 133,000 inmates in 2023. Even if a bill requiring A/C does not pass the Senate, it is likely that the prison system will receive more state funds to install air conditioning. State Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, told the Texas Tribune that the state budget will include the $118 million the TDCJ has requested to install around 11,000 additional cool beds over the next two years. The state will also allocate $3 million for new dorms, which would be air conditioned, she wrote in the statement, the Tribune reported. Huffman did not respond to Statesman requests for comment. State Rep. Richard Hayes, R-Hickory Creek, said he voted against the proposal because he believed a federal judge had already required the state to install air conditioning in prisons. He also doesn't believe all prisoners need climate control, though he said some populations do. "We didn't have A/C when I was a kid," Hayes told the Statesman, adding that some military facilities also lack air conditioning. Canales, the House's second-most conservative Democrat as per the Texas Tribune's 2023 rankings, disagrees with lawmakers who view installing A/C as 'soft on crime.' Heat can increase aggression and cause disorientation among inmates, he said, making them more difficult to control for guards who also struggle in sweltering temperatures. 'It's not soft on crime,' Canales said. 'It's stupid on crime.' This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas House overwhelmingly passes bill to require A/C in state prisons
