Extreme heat is a matter of life and death in prisons
Earlier this week, Adrienne Boulware, an incarcerated woman at the Central California Women's Facility (CCWF), died during a brutal heatwave. The California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) said it appeared the woman suffered a preventable heat death. The woman’s daughter told the Sacramento Bee that her mother had complained about the physical toll of the summer weather for years. Other women incarcerated at CCWF said they shared their struggles and fears with prison officials again and again, to no avail.
CCWF cells lack air conditioning, despite summer temperatures regularly exceeding 100 degrees. Women incarcerated there have communicated to advocates that prison officials are not providing sufficient cold water and other supplies to alleviate their suffering and reduce heat stroke risks.
In a statement shared by CCWP, Trancita Ponce, a Chowchilla resident said, “Please help us, they’re not doing anything for us. There is hot air blowing inside of our rooms, I have a huge migraine and I feel sick and other girls are throwing up.”
A system-wide crisis
The conditions at CCWF, brought to light by the death of Adrienne Boulware, are not new and are not unique to this facility. IGP runs programs at nine CA state prisons, including CCWF. In recent weeks, the temperatures at multiple sites have consistently been in the triple digits, with some sites reaching 115 degrees in the afternoons. Our staff and program participants have complained of light-headedness and migraines, and we’ve had to cancel some classes scheduled for indoor spaces that, with no air circulation or air conditioning, feel more dangerously hot than even the unshaded outdoor spaces. Additionally, many of our participants have pre-existing medical conditions and physical disabilities that make heat exposure even more consequential.
Extreme heat kills more people than all other extreme weather events or natural disasters. It is also well documented that heat can exacerbate countless underlying health conditions and contribute to a wide range of illnesses and injuries, from strokes and kidney disorders to workplace accidents.
Last year, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (EBC) published The Impacts of Climate Change on Incarcerated People in California State Prisons”, a report making the case for incarcerated people as one of the most vulnerable populations when it comes to extreme heat, among other climate hazards. According to EBC, incarcerated people are exceptionally susceptible to extreme heat for a long list of reasons, including the aging infrastructure and overcrowding of facilities, the lack of air conditioning and ventilation, the disproportionate number of people with health conditions that heat can make worse, the prevalence of psychiatric drugs that exacerbate the consequences of heat, and a lack of emergency response infrastructures in nearby communities. Almost two-thirds of incarcerated people that EBC surveyed reported that they didn’t have access to air conditioning during extremely hot days.
Another report released last year offered the first epidemiological evidence of the link between the climate crisis and prison mortality in the U.S. Researchers found that a 10-degree temperature increase above the average correlated with a 5.2 percent increase in deaths — or a 6.7 percent increase among prisoners with heart disease.
Over the years, incarcerated people have responded to extreme heat and inadequate mitigation measures with protest, including hunger strikes and litigation. Citing the 8th Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, more than 1,200 U.S. court cases challenging temperature conditions in prisons and jails were filed between 1980 and 2019. Temperature regulation court cases in states, including Arizona, Mississippi and Wisconsin, have decided in favor of incarcerated people.
The conversations that we’ve been having at IGP about rising temperatures and the safety of our staff and participants has me recalling some of my own heat stress experiences while incarcerated in CA state prisons. There were days that it would get so intolerably hot that some of the men, out of sheer desperation, would break their cell windows to increase airflow or flood their toilets and lay down on the wet floors to cool off.
Climate crisis response must include our most vulnerable communities
Last month, California’s Occupational Health and Safety (Cal/OSHA) Standards Board voted unanimously to implement rules protecting indoor workers from extreme heat. The new regulations, designed to provide protections for millions of people in workspaces that are getting dangerously hot as the climate warms, originally included prisons and jails. When the state Department of Finance withdrew its support at the last minute, noting financial concerns, Cal/OSHA excluded prisons and jails from the standards to push the proposal forward, impacting both incarcerated people and staff in those facilities.
The decision to remove prisons and jails from the standards reflects a pervasive bias against incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people that shows up in everything from cultural stereotypes and stigmas to housing and workplace discrimination to voting rights and public policy. People who are incarcerated are disproportionately vulnerable to climate hazards and yet, this population is more often than not ignored and/or excluded from discourse and decision making about climate change and the environmental threats that come with a warming planet.
The Ella Baker Center report referenced above concluded with several California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) policy and budget recommendations, including specific strategies to reduce the prison population, strengthen oversight of the CDCR, increase emergency preparedness training, and reallocate funding to expand heating, air conditioning, ventilation, shade structures, and backup generators.
In addition to pushing for the consideration and implementation of EBC’s recommendations, IGP also continues to cultivate, and advocate for, expanded green spaces in prison yards, as a heat resilience strategy. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, in addition to the obvious benefits of shade trees, even urban green spaces without trees can reduce the overall temperature during summer months.
Adrienne Boulware was set to be released in seven months. Her death is horrific and heart-breaking. It is also just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the systematically unsafe and inhumane conditions in carceral institutions across the state and country. Similarly, the exclusion of prisons and jails from the Cal/OSHA standards despite the disproportionate impact of extreme heat in these settings, is characteristic of a systematic marginalization of incarcerated people’s experiences and voices, even in well-meaning movements for climate justice and human rights.
One of IGP’s core principles is that the people closest to a problem are closest to the solution. We empower our participants to play leadership roles in our programs and in our advocacy efforts, and we prioritize hiring previously incarcerated individuals and those most impacted by the collateral damage of incarceration. We also carry out regular educational prison tours with government officials and work in partnership with other organizations through coalitions like Transformative Programming Works.
We carry out all of these efforts, and others, to ensure that the needs, voices, and leadership of people in prison and reentry are centered in environmental and climate justice movements, as well as public policy and budget decision-making.
An EBC survey respondent incarcerated at the California State Prison in LA County shared this poignant plea that is an important reminder to all of us working to heal the planet and build a more humane world: "The only recommendations I have is, prisoners/inmates are human beings as well. Treat and take care of [them] as you would want to be treated in the process of climate emergencies. Deliver that message to CDCR.”
In Community,
Andrew
