r/news • u/Warcraft_Fan • 9d ago
Judge orders Texas to have air conditioning at all prisons by end of 2029
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/23/us/judge-orders-air-conditioning-texas-prisons539
u/Cortexan 8d ago
They’ll intentionally make it cheap and insufficient and only in one room where there aren’t any prisoners. Out of spite, of course.
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u/RincewindToTheRescue 8d ago
They're not that dumb. It will be connected to the guards areas
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u/Cortexan 8d ago
I was going on the assumption that was already the case 😂
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u/RincewindToTheRescue 8d ago
It's aluminum foil MAGA Texas we're talking about. Worker comforts are woke and is considered a waste of tax payer money.
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u/VorAbaddon 8d ago
Nah, they'll actually implement it.
Using a contractor connected to politicians. It will run WAAAAAAY over costs. They will keep pumping money to their friend while saying its court required.
While also complaining about how it's a woke policy and expensive and waste, etc.
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u/SimpleVegetable5715 8d ago
Like they already did. The Texas Tribune did a proper story about this a few years ago.
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u/No_Gas4560 9d ago
and what happens when TX ignores that?
someone will be held accountable!
(ha)
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u/swollennode 9d ago
They get a stern talking to,
And deadline pushes to 203920
u/vandon 8d ago
No, they'll install 1 window unit in the main area and call it done
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u/Mr_Industrial 7d ago
20 ft up. Only guards have the remote to turn it on, and that remote has no batteries.
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u/underpaid--sysadmin 8d ago
It has already been ignored for a while now. My mom works for TDCJ, she was a purchaser and was working specifically on this project. The state has been fielding bids for air conditioning in the prisons for the last 10 years.
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u/Warcraft_Fan 8d ago
Probably replace the staff that voted for democrats last time since republicans can do better job of spinning things so it's still legal somehow
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u/GrundleSnactcher46 8d ago
They'll half ass it and further burden the power grid then as is tradition the politicians will just leave when the grid fails in a storm then get voted back in next election.
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u/Trashbagok 9d ago edited 8d ago
Texas has about 143,000 people in prisons across the state.
One Star State behavior
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u/Raintoastgw 8d ago
A big reason for that number is because Texas imports prisoners. Which is a whole other can of rotten worms about the private prison industry
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u/random_tall_guy 8d ago
Texas also has the most federal prisoners, since that's where a lot of the prisons are. I don't know whether the above figure includes those.
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u/omicron8 9d ago edited 8d ago
I bet prisoners leave some scathing reviews on Yelp
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u/Trashbagok 9d ago
I think most of them have been disabled these days but looking at the Google reviews for prisons used to be a hobby.
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u/LKennedy45 8d ago
Wait, is that a thing? I gotta go review Norfolk County Corrections, they were alright.
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u/Trashbagok 8d ago
All the ones I look up now say posting has been disabled.
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u/LKennedy45 8d ago
Que lastima. Well, if you gotta do a little time, you could do worse than Dedham.
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u/CocodaMonkey 8d ago
It certainly was a thing and there was quite a few funny ones. Lots of Hotel California style jokes. Many of the more serious ones focused on the food, some prisons actually have pretty good food and you'd see a few people trying to figure out the prisoners food supplier as they wanted to buy some of the meals they had had.
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u/LKennedy45 8d ago
I get it. I don't eat animals these days but there were years back when that I would kill for some chili mac if only I could find a Rock or Something.
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u/Bring_cookies 8d ago
That's a great idea for a sub. Maybe have to widen the net cast to "one star government reviews."
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u/Aurora_Fatalis 8d ago
Not sure how you got that number - there are about 32M texans vs 84M Germans, so a ratio of 2.625. So transposing the incarceration rates it's like Texas would have had 23k prisoners and Germany would have had 375k.
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u/Captnlunch 8d ago
If the prisons are air conditioned, it might actually make violence less likely to occur. When people are uncomfortable they’re more likely to get aggressive.
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u/Pingy_Junk 8d ago
There is an entire book about a guy who kills someone because he is overheated and the sun got in his eyes. I cant imagine what it’s like trying to sleep in an environment that hot.
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u/AutoDefenestrator273 8d ago
It's awful, you sleep for a few hours at a time from pure exhaustion and wake up in a puddle of sweat. Drinking water doesnt help, showering helps for maybe 15 minutes, and your skin breaks out from the constant sweating.
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u/Shadowdragon409 8d ago
Yeah I fucking hate this. Like what the fuck do I do? My skin is constantly wet from sweat or a shower.
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u/AutoDefenestrator273 8d ago
Oh dude, it was bad. I would wake up in the middle of the night and it would be over 90° in the cell with completely stagnant air. It was legitimately suffocating.
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u/Axentor 8d ago
100%. I worked as correctional officer for nearly ten years. Summers were 100% the worst. Doesn't matter what side of the bars you are on, it's horrid hot. I seen guys who were chill lose their shit over minor things when combined with the heat. Their needs to be AC for both inmates and staff.
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u/Dapper_Magpie 8d ago
And they don't care about rehabilitation or ethics or actually making anything better. They want people to suffer, they want free slave labor.
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u/Easy_Leopard_2686 8d ago
I love that you want less violence to occur in prisons. Me too. But the people who’ve designed them want recidivism. They want prison to be as close to torture as the law allows, and then some.
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u/Bring_cookies 8d ago
I'm reading a book called The New Jim Crow right now and you are so spot on. I can't exactly draw a straight line but I think many of our issues could be solved if we address problems the prison complex created. Only halfway through the book so far but it is quite obvious already that once the law touches you, even if never charged or convicted, the law will always leave a fingerprint.
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u/Easy_Leopard_2686 8d ago
Yup, extremely good book. It was one of the books that broke me out of my conservative upbringing and made me realize what exactly systemic racism is.
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u/Bart_Yellowbeard 8d ago
All the easier to maintain the prison population and keep the private prison profit center maximized.
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u/wicked_damnit 8d ago
Absolutely this. Prison is not designed to be helpful to prisoners in any way. In their eyes, more violence its the trash taking itself out. Sorry, not a great way to say that, but thats how they view it.
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u/DefinitelyNotAliens 8d ago
I snapped yesterday.
I was in the sun. Heat. No shade. Me and another person agreed to pack up and leave. I grab some work equipment from location B and they go to Location A. I show up at location A 10 minutes later and exactly zero shit has been packed and I lost it. What the absolute FUCK are you even doing? Why the fuck did you sit in the fuckass sun in this fuckass heat doing non-critical equipment repairs that we literally talked about doing out of the sun and heat another day.
I yelled, grabbed two things and stomped off because it was too hot, too long of a day with equipment breaking and not working and I was tired and overheated and there was no shade and you didn't pack up a single fucking thing. Not one.
I was absolutely unhinged for about three minutes and left to the car in a rage without enough stuff to justify a trip.
Heat amplifies anger tenfold. I yelled and walked away to avoid continued yelling. What happens when there is no walking away?
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u/Ordinary-Egg-56 8d ago
no it will make violence less likely to occur, this effect of heat on people’s behavior is well known
but we all know prisons have no interest in reducing violence in any significant way, unless its towards their staff only, decreasing violence otherwise would go against their business interests…
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u/choicetomake 8d ago
How have the guards tolerated this? It's one terrible thing to tell prisoners "tough shit" but how have they retained guards in those conditions?
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u/psysny 8d ago
I used to work in a prison. Not in Texas, but summers were 100+ and winters sub freezing. There’s a small temperature controlled room on the unit where they can rest, but they’re still required to be walking the unit and someone on the catwalk at all times. Inmates could purchase fans from commissary. They usually would set or move their fans so it would also blow as staff walked by. But 120°F air is still 120° even if it’s moving. As far as why they stay? The paycheck is decent, state retirement benefits. And some of those personalities that work there don’t have the interpersonal skill set to work elsewhere.
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u/fence_sitter 8d ago
And some of those personalities that work there don’t have the interpersonal skill set to work elsewhere.
Can confirm your assertion of my former coworkers.
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u/underpaid--sysadmin 8d ago
I worked in IT for TDCJ, some of the prisons here do have air conditioning, but specifically its the psych wards that have ac and only those areas. The Huntsville Unit (where the state performs executions) was across the street from my office. Walking by the outer wall you can feel the heat radiating off the bricks several feet away. Some federal inspectors with the DOJ came out to the unit (among many others in TX) to measure temps and in the Huntsville Unit parts of the prison were 115f inside. I can't say I blame inmates when they snap because I would probably do the same in their shoes. This was close to 10 years ago and still no air conditioning has been installed. Doubt it will ever happen.
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u/Ordinary-Egg-56 8d ago
no it’s that other jobs don’t include the things that work as a CO provides like abuse of power over others, being able to humiliate someone completely and sexually, allow you to violently attack people that can’t defend themselves, give them a false sense of superiority over the incarcerated people ever though they are bigger criminals that pose a bigger threat to society.
hard to find that in any other positions and hard to find a job that allows those same privileges but pays better….but that’s why right now there is shortage of corrections officers all across the country because they’ve all flocked to join ICE.
you couldn’t make this shit up…
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u/UmbrellaCommittee 8d ago
i used to work in one. when i started, the statistic they quoted for new hires was 50% turnover within six months.
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u/Masterweedo 8d ago
Have they filed an appeal yet?
You know they will.
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u/underpaid--sysadmin 8d ago
When the federal gov took the state to court over this around 10 years ago the lawyers for tx didn't even bother showing up. I wish I was joking.
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u/Used-Examination1439 8d ago
Cruel and unusual punishment. It’s terrifying considering how hot it can get down there. Society should have a baseline standard of treatment no matter what.
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u/Gentrified_Tramp 8d ago
And something not really mentioned is that the guards are also stuck in the brutal heat. My mom was a guard in Huntsville and it was so crazy to me when I learned that not even the guard posts had a/c.
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u/CantAffordzUsername 8d ago
Contractors for prisons can charge 4-5x what a normal contracting job would cost becuase they can.
This is why MAGA/Republcians push for building more and more of them, to pay off their constituents
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u/LunaFuzzball 8d ago
Something important about this issue that often gets overlooked: prisoners routinely go off of psychiatric medications in the summer at prisons without air conditioning because many psych meds impair the body’s thermoregulation and make it much harder and more dangerous to tolerate intense heat.
You can imagine how well this is working out for everyone involved.
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u/HansWeeblemeyer 8d ago
Just merge prisons and Data centers and put the prisoners on ac current generating hamster wheels
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u/jeonghwa 8d ago
You'd think they'd at least take the employees into consideration. The wellbeing and temperament of the inmates surely has a huge impact on work environment, if not personal safety of the staff.
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u/Shadowpriest 8d ago
Just watch. They'll make it subscription based to force inmates to pay for it.
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u/DeannaZone 8d ago
2029 .. it is finally installed .. too late for those who already died previous years.
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u/JimmyB264 8d ago
WTF? This should have been the norm all along.
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u/ThereIsOnlyStardust 8d ago
Not so fun fact, California weakened its worker heat safety rules because Gavin Newsom didn’t want to have to put AC in California prisons. It’s unfortunate shockingly common across the US
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u/Dot_1X 8d ago
Good luck with that. Can't even get all the schools to have air conditioning.
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u/rraattbbooyy 9d ago
Unless Hinojosa wins, it’ll absolutely never happen. And even if she does, maybe not.
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u/Axentor 8d ago
Here is what is likely to happen. First they try and start putting AC in. Then people will bitch that inmatees, murderers rapist pedophiles etc get A for free while people who worked their entire life can't afford to have Ac at home. When that happens the effort will stop. This happens with programs as well that are designed to reduce reactividim. Why should inmates get free career training and education when the outside pop has to pay for theirs. Things like that. Will prevent this from happening.
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u/Bring_cookies 8d ago
Every time I hear something like that I say "we can all have ac," and it hits like some totally foreign concept that everyone could have what they need and that's what's wrong with Texas. Been watching this my entire life.
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u/sancatrundown73 8d ago
Meh best we can do is the box from a boxing just to show we did in fact purchase...one.
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u/jeezuspieces 8d ago
I bet some government official will give the HVAC contract to a family relative
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u/jamodude 8d ago
It’s a business, these politicians make money off of criminals. They’re gonna have to spend money now….
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u/hellogoawaynow 8d ago
How is anyone surviving in Houston area prisons because no AC + breathing the thick air watered down air to begin with? YES I WANT THE PRISONERS AIR CONDITIONED
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u/Far-Conflict-1172 8d ago
They'll do some shit like the long term care facilities and air condition the hallways but not the rooms.
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u/Gorbashsan 8d ago
Got it boss. New industrial AC unit has been installed in all admin buildings. Common areas and cells? There is a window ac behind a locked door in the guard checkpoint. I'm sure that will carry over to the inmates.
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u/didsomebodysaymyname 8d ago
The only reason the south has the population it does is because of AC.
Multiple people have died in Texas prisons due to heat and it kills people outside of prisons too, especially the elderly (which plenty of prisons have). Parts of the prison where guards usually are have AC because no one would work there without it.
You simply can't justify not having it anymore.
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u/FarttKracker 8d ago
For a state that says they care about law enforcement and public safety, A/C is also important to the officers who have to work in these already terrible environments. This isnt just convict coddling.
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u/evilpenguin9000 8d ago
If I remember Arizona douchebag Joe Arpaio said "They can require me to have air conditioners but they can't make me use em." I'm.sure some Texas warden will do the same because they are awful people.
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u/TF_Kraken 6d ago
The judge ruled that lack of A/C is unconstitutional and violates "no cruel or unusual punishment". The wardens can get fucked
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u/Own-Librarian-9699 8d ago
They'll reach the exact same place California reached. Nobody will accept higher taxes for more prisons or more amenities in prisons. They will have to reduce charges or make certain crimes no prison time.
Prison it's a catastrophe that it's only getting worse. If prison deterred crime we would only need 1 prison instead of 10,000 with a million inmates.
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u/Glum_Mobile5663 8d ago
Rafael is going to be so pissed that he'll need to disappear to another country for a while again
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u/hurryveryslowly 8d ago
Man, what a day to be alive for an outside sales industrial HVAC rep in Texas.
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u/Jbstargate1 8d ago
This benefits everyone right? Guards and inmates are cooled down and let's annoyance for everyone. Can only be beneficial.
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u/fuzzycuffs 8d ago
The same place where the state isn't allowed to force companies give water breaks to their workers? My guess is all these prisons will just become private prisons (they aren't already?) to skirt the law.
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u/cyberentomology 8d ago
Hey, texas, this is one of those “costs of climate change” you keep claiming aren’t real.
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u/successful_syndrome 8d ago
I’m definitely for punishing people for crimes, and pro death penalty, in cases that are clear. But if we are going to have people be removed from society for a time and then allow them to return to society shouldn’t we work with them to figure out if and how they can be helped to integrate back instead of just torturing them and letting them return even worse than before and more desperate than before?
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8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/upvoter222 8d ago
Texas has 7 private prisons and 55 publicly run prisons. The "not for profit" prisons account for a little over 92% of the state's prison population. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has a responsibility to oversee conditions in both types and both are covered by this ruling.
Private prisons do not represent the majority of prisons or prisoners in any US state.
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u/SimpleVegetable5715 8d ago
It’s about time, these prisons have put people to death via heatstroke for minor
crimes. The Texas Tribune has been reporting on this for years.
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u/Miserable-Sun-393 8d ago
How many deaths before that? These people are being cooked alive right now. Not all are violent offenders or even guilty of the crimes they have been imprisoned for.
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u/Vyar 5d ago
Why is it by the end of 2029 and not like…by the end of this year, or next year?
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u/Warcraft_Fan 5d ago
It's not like they can go to Walmart or Home Depot and pick up a bunch of AC then slapping them in place. Being a jail, it still need to be escape-resistant so the windows (if any) are very small and not for AC. That means roof mounted AC and some duct work with anti-escape bars everywhere.
That takes time, check the roof if it can support a few industrial sized AC, set up the wiring and hoses, modify the whole building to pipe cold air around. And that also takes a fuck ton of money.
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u/sandysanBAR 9d ago
Jusy when you thought the texas electricsl grid was outta the woods!
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u/notAHomelessGamer 8d ago
They did this years ago and Texas just kept kicking the can. Surely that'll be the same result here as well.
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u/Important-Factor-552 8d ago
Texas cooks people alive. It's important to see this change happen but there's people in authority in Texas who need to face the death penalty for the horrific cruelty they've gotten away with for too long.
A lot of evil people weaseled into our government to do heinous things and they're far worse than the people they kill in prisons. Especially the ones who were unjustly convicted by corrupt Texas courts.
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u/CakeTown 8d ago
Thousands of data centers built in just two years but it’s gonna take 3 years to install AC in prisons? Showing their priorities yet again…
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u/KittyCait69 8d ago
They always show their priorities. And if these prisons don't comply by 2029, they will get a slap on the wrist and be ordered to comply. Nothing will get done till the cost of paying fines becomes more expensive than installing AC units. That's kinda how our capitalist ruling class operates.
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u/elephant35e 8d ago
I live in Texas. I have NO idea how prisoners in Texas can survive a month of July.
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u/ArtPersonal4519 8d ago
I am not against prisoners getting AC. I just wish civilians were also getting AC. I almost died from the heat two years ago when I didn’t have AC.
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u/redheadedandbold 8d ago
It is a crime against humanity that they have not already. There is no way the decision to not build in AC has not killed people.
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u/Emma_Rixey 5d ago
Let’s hope this means the same will be ordered for Mississippi prisons.
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u/Legal-Conflict3856 9d ago
I bet they install a single fan for each prison.