Francesca Walker ‘24

For nearly a decade in the all women Lowell Correctional Facility in Ocala, Florida, one inmate spent night upon treacherous night hobbling back and forth on a sweat soaked path. Twilight provided no relief as the humid Southern nights seeped through the prison walls, penetrating her layers of dampened state-issued blues. The only escape Laurette Phillipsen found from the blistering heat of her dorm was drenching herself in the cool showers, only to return and lay atop her made bed, where the moisture would again flee, sustaining this cooling cycle until the hours of the next blistering day.

Florida summers can seem unbearable, with temperatures in the high 80s and a grueling humidity to match. The sultry beaches can offer a cooling atmosphere, especially when accompanied by cold drinks and fresh ocean air. Best of all, there’s the comfort in knowing you can escape the sun to enter an ocean side eatery and be greeted by a nice gust of AC blasting. These reliefs are not awarded to the imprisoned.

Prisons often lack any form of cooling. This is particularly problematic in the south, where summer temperatures can regularly spike above 100 degrees. Inside prisons, the lack of air conditioning is often compounded by the issue of barred and broken windows. It sounds like such a simple issue, yet it remains both unsolved and seemingly undocumented as well.

The problem of heat in prisons has often been overshadowed by existing concerns of abuse and neglect, as well as the many other issues that arise behind bars. Yet, in actuality, the heat exacerbates each grievance, where there's extreme heat there's abuse; where there's extreme heat there's assault, medical malpractice, suicide, and in the worst cases, death.

“The heat is just deteriorating their health, they’re literally baking them,” said Dr. Amite Dominick, President of The Texas Prisons Community Advocates, an organization advocating for those suffering from extreme temperatures within the Texas prison system.

The boxcar type style of the dorms creates an atmosphere where they “freeze in the winter and roast in the summer,” said Penny Schoner from the Prison Activist Resource Center. In areas across the south, especially, the extremities of climate lead to a multitude of adverse health effects.

“It’s hotter inside the dorms than it is outside,” said Deborah Bennett, a former inmate at Lowell, where she served for eleven years. Bennett now heads a non-profit organization, Change Comes Now, dedicated to facilitating prisoner solidarity and advocating for the inhumane conditions of Florida prisons. Despite the intense heat, out of the five dormitories in Lowell, only 2 of them have “working” HVAC units, “It’s excruciating,” Bennett emphasized, “You have no moving air in the room.”

In the two that are awarded “climate control” systems, as they call them, at risk residents only reap the benefits on occasions when the flaky units decide to operate as they are often accustomed to shutting down without warning. The dorms that rely on climate control often house those who need accommodations the most: elderly, pregnant women, and those who are handicapped or have disabilities that could be triggered or worsened by the constant heat. Furthermore, the dorms with HVAC in Lowell do not have working windows. So when their cooling units break down, as they often do, these vulnerable populations are left in spaces with zero ventilation; the results proved to be undoubtedly dangerous. “So many women prone to seizures would have episodes onset by the heat,” Phillipsen said.

Among the affected populations in this prison, pregnant women are often left to suffer. Only three facilities in Florida have accommodations that support these inmates: Lowell Correctional, Lowell Annex, and Florida Women's Reception Center, all of which are walking distance from one another. Even though these women are meant to be given priority due to their condition through “heat passes”, which are given to those with medical ailments or high priority medical grades, facilities like Lowell continually place at risk populations in living spaces with no HVAC units, a result of lack of space and overcrowding in the Florida DOC.

On top of the discomfort pregnant women already feel in heat, recent research such as Amal Rammah’s study titled “Temperature, placental abruption and stillbirth,” has revealed possibly lethal outcomes for women exposed to constant high temperatures and dehydration leading to issues in the placenta that influence preterm labor and premature rupture of membranes which could result in the fetus’ death.

“Oftentimes, unfortunately, they have very shallow rationale,” stated Jennifer Wedekind, senior staff attorney for the ACLU National Prison Project. Along with advocating for better physical conditions behind bars, this chapter of the ACLU focuses on work regarding conditions of confinement through litigation in an attempt to alleviate the “Dismal mental health care in prisons,” said Wedekind.

In particular this chapter has begun work on the effects of heat on psychotropic medications (i.e. antidepressants, antianxiety medications, stimulants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers) that inmates take inside prisons, defining those on these medications as being more susceptible to “heat injury.” Most psychotropic medications restrict the body from sweating, leading to overheating, dehydration, and an inability to regulate your body temperature when under extreme heat. In instances like this, those on these types of medications are often left with whether or not they should take their prescriptions and face the physical consequences, or abstain from them and have to deal with withdrawals and being unmedicated to survive the summer.

Some women turn to violence as a result of these conditions. In attempts to beat the heat, Bennett explained that some girls would plan fights so that they could be placed in solitary confinement where, although isolated, they were free of the debilitating effects of unpaid labor. “It's hard to walk, hard to move,” said Bennett.

The only time the women at Lowell have outside their dorms is often to do their Department of Corrections (DOC) sanctioned work, often agricultural labor, which frequently involves “pushing twenty-year-old lawn mowers” in the humidity and heat in pants and two layers of thick shirts for 20 cents an hour, “if that,” added Phillipsen.

The conditions of yard work are made increasingly difficult by the onset of summer as they are forced to work all year round in “unconstitutional conditions,” said Dante Trevisani, the Executive Director of the Florida Justice Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to filing civil rights claims to promote prisoner rights. “It's hot for the officers, it's hot for everybody.”

Although the minimum wage in Florida is now $10, the most an inmate can make in a Florida prison is 50 cents an hour, regardless of the extremities of the labor. The inmates are required to work daily, contrary to laws passed by the Department of Labor that identifies intense heat as a reason to halt work, behind bars, “Things like OSHA protections don't apply,” said Wedekind.

If the planned fights didn’t work out, the women would sometimes go to the lengths of declaring a “psychological emergency”, or say they were going to commit suicide, In these instances, they would be stripped of their clothing and placed in a straitjacket to go to suicide watch.

Another glaring issue within the topic of health and heat is the growing rates of suicide in southern prisons. “Last year the rate was so high, there was a suicide every day one week,” said Dr. Dominick on a Texas facility. In a study done by the Texas Justice Initiative, they found that this is the second time since 2005 that so many Texas prisoners have taken their lives in such a short amount of time.

These staggering statistics point to an escalating problem among prisons that facilitate negative mental health outcomes due to isolation and a cutting off of physical contact from the outside. This issue is due to the onset of the pandemic and the dormitories and visitation rooms that don't support social distancing guidelines.

There remains an apparent lack of medical supplies such as face masks and the banning of hand sanitizer [because of its alcohol content] in prisons across the country. “We are sitting ducks for the next virus,” said current inmate Keiko Kopp, who began documenting prison life during COVID through 15-second videos sent to her mother, who uploaded them on the social media app TikTok. In her videos that garnered millions of views, she talked about the consistent negligence, maltreatment, and unsafe conditions of incarceration during COVID-19, especially on topics regarding abuse and lack of resources. “Why are we given no hand soap, no paper towels, no bleach? We’ve not run out, it just does not exist here,” said Kopp.

In an attempt to uncover the lengthy abuse behind bars, Kopp turned to TikTok to gain traction, given the lack of contact inmates had with the outside world due to restricted visitations during the start of the pandemic. In one of her videos, she exposed the effects of dwindling staff as inmates began to take over major care taking roles. “The inmates forced to care for [the elderly] aren't trained and don't want to be forced to change diapers or clean up accidents, which causes tension and more mistreatment,” she said. These `inmate aids', as Kopp called them, often are forced to care for their older peers with waning resources. The burden of watching the abuse became too much at times, and some workers attempted suicide from the daily “horrific” neglect.

Efforts to improve incarceration conditions amidst the pandemic are often silenced by the DOC. “At Lowell, I was brought to classification and threatened to lose all contact with family and confinement if I didn't stop my videos,” explains Kopp. This threat became a reality following a phone interview. Since Kopp’s last video posted in January of this year, she has since been restricted of all tablet and phone kiosk privileges for 180 days and her mother was given a cease and desist letter.

With evolving discoveries of maltreatment in prisons like Mississippi State Penitentiary, “unconstitutional” issues of abuse continue to span across the south. Not only are the conditions themselves unbearable, but they are oftentimes used against the inmates, “the [Correctional Officers] use it as a coercive power,” said Wedekind. In order to get control of the inmates, Correctional Officers (CO’s) threaten to turn off fans or exhaust in retaliation. The separation in treatment is evident in this scene laid out by a past inmate, “The air [in the staff room] was so cold that the windows fogged up,” meanwhile the rest of the women in the dorm were forced to endure the blazing temperatures, Bennett recalled.

These types of separations and the further utilization of the harsh environment as an abusive force increases tensions between the two groups. The heat “makes them [inmates] more agitated,” said Trevisani. This, quite literally, heated environment pushes individuals to their physical and psychological limits, a state in which neither inmate nor enforcement officer is adept to withstand.

Often, when the issue of heat is brought up in bills or legislation that could facilitate change on these conditions, the issue of money and time are often utilized to justify the utter lack of action of correction in these struggling facilities. However, this issue only heightens as time passes with no improvements, in the last decade alone, at least 13 men have died of heat stroke while incarcerated, and dozens more—both inmates and guards—get sick, needing intravenous fluids, states the Texas Tribune. As more inmates succomb to horrific heat, the issue of money seems almost in favor of change, Dr. Amite Dominick states, “It’s pretty costly, to keep this situation where we are torturing people is actually costingthe state more money.”

Incarcerated Bodies in Heat