Despite receiving substantial state funding to air-condition prisons in the last few years, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has stayed mum on when it will install cooling across the system.
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.”
Source: Hayden Betts, The Texas Tribune
Photo Credit: Inmates from left, Richard Hernandez, Arnulfo Ayala, and William Baucum in the Bartlett Innovation Unit in Bartlett, Texas on Nov. 21, 2024. Credit: Lorianne Willett/The Texas Tribune
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