Bill requiring air conditioning in all Texas prisons wins preliminary House approval ...Middle East

AUSTIN (Texas Tribune) — The Texas House gave preliminary approval Thursday to a bill requiring prisons to have air conditioning by the end of 2032.

Lawmakers passed 89-43 House Bill 3006 by Terry Canales, D-Edinburg. If the Legislature or the federal government allocates funding, it will require the installation of climate control in phases to be completed by the end of 2032. The bill must go through one more round of approval in the House before it can clear its last hurdle in the Senate.

“The bill targets key housing units and medical spaces, kitchens, and administrative offices in state prison facilities to ensure the most critical spaces are temperature-controlled,” said Rep. Eddie Morales Jr., D-Eagle Pass, a co-sponsor of the bill, told lawmakers.

The bill mandates that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice purchase and install climate control systems to ensure temperatures are maintained between 65 and 85 degrees in certain areas. The installation will occur in three phases, capped at $100 million per phase, and completion is set for 2028, 2030 and 2032.

This session, four prison heat-related bills filed by House members have been referred to the House Corrections Committee: HB 1315, HB 2997, HB 3006, and HB 489. However, Canales' bill was the only one to make it out of committee.

Officials from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which oversees the state’s 101 prison facilities, asked lawmakers for $118 million over the next biennium to install air conditioning in about 11,000 units. Even if lawmakers grant that request, millions more will be needed to get to the at least $1.1 billion the TDCJ says will be needed to fully air condition its prisons.

Since the House Corrections Committee wrote in its 2018 interim report to the Legislature that TDCJ’s heat mitigation efforts were not enough to ensure the well-being of inmates and the correctional officers who work in prisons, lawmakers have tried to pass bills that would require the agency to install air conditioning. None of those bills made it to the governor’s desk.

During that time, TDCJ has been slowly installing air conditioning. The department also has added 11,788 “cool beds” and is in the process of procuring about 12,000 more. The addition is thanks to $85.5 million state lawmakers appropriated during the last legislative session. Although not earmarked for air conditioning, an agency spokesperson said all of that money is being used to cool more prisons.

Still, about two-thirds of Texas’ prison inmates reside in facilities that are not fully air conditioned in housing areas. Indoor temperatures routinely top 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and inmates report oppressive, suffocating conditions in which they douse themselves with toilet water in an attempt to cool off. Hundreds of inmates have been diagnosed with heat-related illnesses, court records state, and at least two dozen others have died from heat-related causes.

The pace at which the state is installing air conditioning is insufficient, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman wrote in a 91-page decision in late March. The lack of system-wide air conditioning violates the U.S. Constitution, and the prison agency’s plan to slowly chip away at cooling its facilities — over an estimated timeline of at least 25 years — is too slow, he wrote.

Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said in an emailed statement that the supplemental appropriations bill will include the $118 million TDCJ requested to fund approximately 11,000 new air-conditioned beds. It also will include $301 million to construct additional dorms — which the prison agency requested to accommodate its growing prison population — and those new facilities will all be air-conditioned.

An internal investigation also found that TDCJ has falsified temperatures, and an investigator hired by the prison agency concluded that some of the agency’s temperature logs are false. Citing that report, Pitman wrote “The Court has no confidence in the data TDCJ generates and uses to implement its heat mitigation measures and record the conditions within the facilities.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at www.texastribune.org. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans - and engages with them - about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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