It would cost $1.5 billion to fully cool all prisons, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice estimates.
Texas’ prison agency has asked the Legislature for $298 million over the next two years to add more than 15,700 air conditioned beds, saying the request will help deliver “significant and measurable progress” toward addressing dangerous summer heat in state lockups.
Inmate advocates are less enthused, calling the budget request a sign of “deliberate indifference” to deadly conditions that will require an estimated $1.5 billion to correct.
The budget debate comes as a federal judge weighs whether to order Texas to cool prisons where indoor temperatures routinely surpass 100 degrees in the summer, creating conditions U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman found to be “plainly unconstitutional” before he presided over a two-week trial on prison heat earlier this year.
It’s not clear when Pitman will issue his ruling. To help the judge with that decision, both sides in the yearslong legal fight — Texas prison officials and inmate advocacy groups that sued the state — submitted post-trial legal briefs that show how far apart they remain.
In a June court filing, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice outlined a two-phase plan to install air conditioning at all prisons. The brief says the agency “anticipates that it could obligate” $774 million in the 2028–29 state budget, followed by $730.7 million in the following two years.
TDCJ’s $298 million request for the next two-year budget puts it far behind its outlined schedule, signaling that the agency is still not treating extreme prison heat as an emergency, inmate advocates say. Nearly two-thirds of Texas’ 104 prisons are not fully air conditioned.
“This is more deliberate indifference,” said Erica Grossman, an attorney for the plaintiffs. “And it will lead to more completely preventable inmate deaths in the extreme heat every year.”
At least 10 inmates died from heat-related reasons in the scorching summers between 2023 and 2025, the lawsuit alleged. The agency disputes this figure, instead attributing the causes to drug overdoses or other medical conditions.
In a statement to The Texas Tribune, TDCJ said its budget request shows a commitment to increasing the number of air conditioned beds while balancing other needs such as prison population growth, which is projected to soon top 150,000.
In particular, TDCJ said its $298 million request to install air conditioning is more than double what it sought, and received, in the last legislative session. The agency also asked for $591.8 million to build expansion prison dorms with climate control. It said the requests, if approved by lawmakers, would add more than 21,000 cool beds.
“Together, these requests underscore significant and measurable progress toward expanding the capacity of cool beds,” TDCJ said.
Grossman, who is seeking a court order forcing Texas to air condition its entire prison system by the end of 2029, said she wasn’t surprised that prison officials are already dialing back their $774 million phase one target. During the trial, agency officials said it was less of a plan and more of an aspiration.
“They are outlines of how much money it would take to fund the system but never something that they ever, ever, ever commit to asking for,” she said. “This only reinforces the need for a court order to fix this problem.”
TDCJ is also overstating its commitment to prison cooling by touting the full construction cost of building air conditioned expansion dorms, Grossman added.
“Expansion dorms are not the same thing as installing air conditioning” in prisons where heat remains a risk to health, she said.
“Good fiscal stewards”
State law requires county jails to be kept between 65 and 85 degrees. Applying a similar standard to prisons, many of them constructed decades before air conditioning became available, has raised one central sticking point: Cost.
Former TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier, who retired last year, has said he wanted to cool every facility but didn’t have the money to complete the task.
Bills to require climate-controlled state prisons have repeatedly failed at the Texas Legislature, which also declined to tap billions of dollars in budget surpluses in recent sessions to retrofit units with air conditioning. Even so, TDCJ said lawmakers have already provided “a historic infusion of funding” by allocating $85 million in 2023 and $118 million the following session to add around 29,000 cool beds.
The Legislature also gave TDCJ more than $400 million in 2025 to build air-conditioned expansion dorms and buy an existing lockup with climate control.
With an estimated $1.5 billion needed to cool all prisons, inmate advocates say prison officials need to push for a lot more in direct funding.
“It’s a lot and it’s expensive, but all it takes is money,” Jeff Edwards, an attorney, told the Tribune ahead of the federal trial over prison heat earlier this year. “And so if you don’t ask for the money, you’re never going to get it.”
Collier and his successor, Bobby Lumpkin, said the agency must maintain credibility with state lawmakers by requesting only what can be achieved within a two-year budget cycle while balancing other major priorities, such as inmate healthcare and contraband detection.
“We have to be good fiscal stewards,” Lumpkin said at the trial.
In its court filing, TDCJ also outlined additional obstacles to installing air conditioning, including the rural location of most prisons, their age and construction delays due to contraband search. In addition, the agency said the demand to build data centers in Texas has caused “significant issues with equipment availability.”
Ahead of the legislative session that begins in January, Republican leaders have instructed state agencies to cut 3% from their budget requests to help fund priorities such as property tax cuts. TDCJ told the Tribune that this amounts to around $287 million in cuts, but the agency did not specify what it had to chop.
“Agency leadership will work closely with the legislature to explain the operational impact of not restoring the funding,” TDCJ said in a statement.
Dispute over the number of heat-related prison deaths
Beyond the cost, both sides have sparred over the human toll of insufficient air conditioning in Texas prisons.
Court documents show that at least 23 people died from heat-related reasons in Texas prisons between 1998 and 2012. The lawsuit also alleged that there were at least 10 additional heat-related deaths in recent years, including three people whose 2023 autopsy reports mention heat as a possible contributing factor.
TDCJ has disputed the recent figure.
At the trial and in the June legal brief to the judge, state attorneys argued that the deaths could be attributed to factors such as drug overdose or other medical conditions. The only death the agency has reported as being likely related to heat in recent years was a man who collapsed while playing soccer in the recreation yard of the Goree Unit in Huntsville.
Meanwhile, TDCJ’s court filing acknowledged more than 150 cases of heat-related illness among inmates and prison staff since 2022. Thousands of heat-related grievances have also been filed by inmates.
The agency touts strategies for mitigating sweltering indoor temperatures, including cooled respite rooms as well as providing water, cold showers, fans and cooling towels. The department also developed a heat score system to identify and prioritize cooling for people more prone to heat illnesses.
Inmate advocates say more is needed.
They argue that the heat score system’s criteria does not benefit all inmates who are at high risk of heat illnesses, such as those with undiagnosed mental health issues. In addition, mitigation offers only temporary relief and is not always easily accessible, they say.
For instance, TDCJ requires an inmate to have less than $5 in their prison account for 180 days before they are considered indigent and eligible for a free fan.
Some people have difficulty affording a fan amid the oppressive summer heat, said Charlie Malouff, vice president of Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, an advocacy group that is a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
“That’s concerning,” said Malouff, who was held in Texas prisons from 2015 to 2018.
Source: Alex Nguyen, The Texas Tribune
Photo Credit: Prison staff and inmates move through the Darrington Unit’s main hallway on July 12, 2017. Jolie McCullough/The Texas Tribune
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