No escape from the heat

It’s only going to get hotter – and even more obvious that the effects of climate change fall unevenly upon us.

It hits hardest those without the resources to escape flooding and other extreme weather events, to afford air conditioning or homes in tree-filled neighborhoods that ease the heat, to relocate to cooler climes.

To these unlucky souls, add the people locked up in our prisons and jails.

Even here, in our supposedly progressive state, many prisons and jails have no air conditioning and lousy ventilation. Some facilities are like kilns, the sun streaming directly into buildings that retain sickening heat, even at night.

“When you’re locked in your cell, you can’t escape it,” said one person held at Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater, replying to questions via email. His attorney asked that his name be withheld to protect him from retaliation. “You just lay there with the only relief being a 12-inch [fan] blowing a meaningless breeze of hot air onto your suffocating body, until the mercy of sleep overtakes you,” he wrote.

How much you suffer depends on where you happen to be locked up, or even what part of the building your cell is in. Some facilities and units have air conditioning and some do not, or they have them and inmates complain that corrections officers refuse to turn them on. Some people say they must beg for cold water and ice.

Those who can afford them buy fans, which help little. They take to pouring water on their floors, or hanging wet clothes, but the moisture evaporates so fast that’s almost useless, too. Meanwhile, those who run our prisons often enjoy climate-controlled spaces.

“It shouldn’t be an accident of geography or how you’re classified that [determines] whether you have air conditioning,” said Jesse White, policy director at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, who has been working to mitigate heat for incarcerated people since 2011, with minimal success. Now she and others say complaints are becoming more frequent, as summers get hotter and longer.

During a recent hot stretch, those who run a puppy-training program at Old Colony, where inmates raise service dogs for veterans, temporarily took their dogs out of the prison, according to the incarcerated man and a spokesman for the program.

“Conditions here are considered too cruel to house a dog but are okay to house human beings,” the man incarcerated there wrote. “Many inmates became depressed when the dogs were taken out, not because they’re great for mental health, but because they began feeling they were lower than an animal and not considered deserving of equal care.”

Dangerous heat is a huge problem in prisons and jails across the country, but we have a confluence of especially dangerous factors here. Climate change is having dramatic effects in this part of the country, and a 2023 study found that the effect of heat on death rates in prisons is highest in the Northeast. We also have an older and sicker group of people locked up in Massachusetts, and buildings so old that they magnify the already dangerous effects of heat.

You don’t have to be a bleeding heart to recognize how appalling and perilous this is. Leaving aside the fact that these are human beings subjected to intolerable and cruel conditions, heat is very dangerous for everybody in a prison.

Heat makes people sick, and those most vulnerable to its effects – inmates who are elderly or ailing, those with respiratory or heart ailments – need medical care and costly hospital stays. It makes people irritable, which drives up tensions inside prisons and jails and endangers everybody, including correctional officers. Suicide attempts, self-injury, and violent attacks rise along with temperatures.

“It is the number one cause of fights in cells,” said Mac Hudson, who spent 33 years incarcerated before being released last year and is now an equity advocate for Prisoners’ Legal Services. “Negotiating that small space creates agitation, and agitation leads to fights. … The heat is paralyzing in some facilities.”

Executive Office of Public Safety spokesperson Elaine Driscoll said the Department of Correction is “committed to maintaining safe, secure environments and taking proactive measures to ensure those living and working in the facilities stay hydrated and cool.” She added that all cells have direct ventilation, and inmates have access to ice water and loaner fans in some prisons.

Prisoner advocates and investigators from the Disability Law Center say that, whatever the state’s standards are, relief from heat is inconsistent, and often subject to the whims of administrators. They have piles of complaints from those inside about windows that don’t open, air conditioning on the blink or not switched on, and water that is always lukewarm.

In the state’s jails, it’s entirely up to the sheriffs whether those locked up – many of whom are awaiting trial and have not been convicted – get meaningful relief from the heat. There, too, there is immense inconsistency. In Worcester County, Sheriff

Lew Evangelidis appears to take a hard line. White says Prisoners’ Legal Services gets more heat complaints from inmates there than in any other county. A spokesman for the sheriff did not respond to a call seeking comment.

In Bristol County, only 114 of the 600 or so people incarcerated there have air conditioning, though there, Sheriff Paul Heroux is trying to do something about it. He says the temperature in some of his units reaches 95 degrees, even at night. He is installing air conditioning in some units and hopes to have climate control for every cell within a couple of years. And he plans to close the notorious Ash Street jail, an aged building where conditions are generally appalling.

“This is our responsibility,” Heroux said. “By improving the conditions for inmates, we also improve work conditions for the COs.” Even the officers who “hate” him see the sense in that, he said.

Chance should not decide whether an inmate is held in a potentially deadly oven. That’s why Senator Cynthia Creem and Representative Brandy Fluker Oakley have proposed legislation that would create one, enforceable, standard for all of the state’s prisons and jails, mandating that the temperature be kept below 78 degrees. The bills will get a hearing in the fall. Advocates are also pushing the Department of Public Health to demand more humane heat standards in every prison and jail in the Commonwealth.

“We don’t beat the heat, it beats us,” said the inmate in Old Colony.

People like him are already doing hard time. Is it too much to ask that they be held in conditions fit for dogs?