Most of Florida’s prisons lack air conditioning — a persistent problem for decades — but this past summer’s excessive heat has brought the issue to the forefront.
Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Ricky Dixon addressed a group of state lawmakers Wednesday, saying that 75 percent of all housing units in Florida’s corrections system currently do not have air-conditioning.
And there doesn’t seem to be any immediate and major solutions.
Dixon explained current mitigation efforts on the A/C issue, such as authorizing inmates to be allowed to wear T-shirts and shorts, providing inmates with hydration packets and having medical staff educate inmates on heat illness prevention.
But Dixon confessed that it’s been a major challenge this summer for the inmates and the corrections staff.
“It’s been suggested that we air condition our current dorms,” he said in addressing the Senate Appropriations Committee on Criminal and Civil Justice on Wednesday. “I’m not opposed to that, but doing so is extremely expensive.”
The department has hired the global auditing firm of KPMG to review the air conditioning situation in Florida prisons, and they are expected to address lawmakers next month.
“When you are in the facility, and you visit a dorm that does not have air conditioning, and you look at the guards who are charged with maintaining security in those spaces, it is absolutely oppressive,” said northeast Republican Sen. Jennifer Bradley, who chairs the committee. “We are going to have to take steps. And that’s why it’s called mitigation. It may not be A/C, but there are things that we can do in our system to mitigate the heat, or Florida will find itself on the receiving end of a lawsuit, and it will be a lot more expensive.”
Bradley also said it was important to acquire accurate data about how hot it actually is in a Florida prison cell. “We don’t have that data, and that to me is a little concerning,” she said. “Good data is good policy.”
The issue is hardly unique to Florida. USA Today reported last year that prisons in at least 44 states aren’t fully air conditioned.
“The absence of air conditioning in prisons and jails is a disaster waiting to happen,” said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, in an interview with the States Newsroom in August. “This is not an issue of comfort or luxury, it is an issue of life and death. … The decision not to air condition these facilities is essentially a decision to let people die.”
Last summer the Department of Corrections began a pilot project at Lowell Correctional Institution — the largest women’s prison in the state— by testing three portable evaporative coolers as a low-cost alternative to try to beat the heat. That effort was led by Gainesville Democratic House member Yvonne Hayes Hinson and inmate advocate Connie Edson.
“A solution has been brought to it,” Edson told lawmakers on Wednesday, referring to the pilot program. “Whether it’s the solution for the older facilities? No. But there is a solution out there. With your funding, we can find the solution.”
But Dixon appeared to dismiss the coolers as any type of long-term alternative.
“These portable units and some band-aid approaches we’ve tried….even the [inmate] population doesn’t like them,” referring to the noise and moisture that they create.
This article originally appeared in florida phoenix