Since the 18th century, when torture, banishment and execution as the cure-all for criminal offenses were slowly replaced by incarceration, the United States experimented with all sorts of underlying strategies for imprisonment. The Auburn System, based on strict work ethics, total silence among inmates, and everyone placed in solitary confinement with a Bible at night, was one approach that was widely adopted in the 1800s. It didn’t work. Neither did the even stricter Pennsylvania System of total isolation in solitary confinement.
We’ve since devolved into mass incarceration – although we represent only 4% of the world’s population, we house a quarter of the world’s inmates – with expensive per prisoner costs (averaging around $40 thousand per year) – into what has become a segregated, gang-controlled system of ultra-violence and degradation under abysmal conditions. As public mental institutions have closed, housing those with serious mental issues (north of a third of inmates) has shifted to our prison system with vastly inadequate treatment options. Drug crimes, now moderated somewhat with the slow legalization of marijuana, still account directly or indirectly for close to half of all convictions. Prisons are graduate schools for criminal activity, and the stigma of former incarceration all but dooms most released inmates from making a legitimate and sustainable living. Recidivism rates have, as a result, continued to be rather extreme.
For those who are incarcerated, overcrowding, filth, vermin and insect infestation, join fetid cells and terrible food to exacerbate confinement. And then there are the obvious and uncontrolled realities of violence and death that plague almost every American prison. Getting your liberty taken away seems the least negative reality of American incarceration. We just have too many inmates to sustain more realistic solutions to criminal deterrence and rehabilitation, which seem like noble goals… that continue to elude us.
Americans typically have little sympathy for inmates, even those jailed and awaiting trials. The notion of inmates cooking for themselves in reasonable accommodations, found in some Scandinavian prisons, is a non-starter here. Some jails, like the seven-acre "Tent City Jail" in Phoenix used for decades that helped make former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio a household name were subject to Arizona heat… often running 130 degrees… forcing a court-ordered closure in 2017. But with climate change, that rising heat is creating a hell on earth for so many jails and prisons, most without air conditioning regardless of the temperatures.
The realities are brought home by these thoughts in a September 3rd LA Times editorial: “Prisons are becoming climate change torture chambers… Summer heat turns non-air-conditioned concrete cells into ovens that cook the people inside alive… The purpose of the juvenile justice system in Louisiana is not to punish but to rehabilitate.
“But dozens of young Louisianans were transferred nearly a year ago to the vacant former death row of the notorious adult maximum security state penitentiary known as Angola, where they have suffered through a summer of record-breaking heat — without air conditioning, according to plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state. As temperatures outside reached triple digits for days, conditions inside the windowless cells became unbearable… This is not rehabilitation, and it’s not even punishment. It is torture.
“Adults are in prison for punishment as well as rehabilitation, but shouldn’t have to endure such conditions any more than teenagers should… Yet intense heat has so affected imprisoned Louisiana adults that officials have had to step up suicide watches. At the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation found indoor temperatures reaching 145 degrees last year. In Texas, where 70% of prison living quarters reportedly lack air conditioning, incarceration becomes execution, as climate change drives already blistering summer temperatures even higher.
“One study found an average of 14 heat-related deaths a year in Texas prisons lacking air conditioning, and none in the relatively few prisons with A/C. The state has seen an average of two prison deaths a day this summer, many of them heat-related despite official insistence that the heat is not to blame.
“Lack of adequate cooling during hot summers has plagued Southern states for decades, but climate change has now made it a problem in Northern states as well — Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, Indiana. Brutal heat is especially lethal for aging inmates. It exacerbates already challenging mental health problems, which are rampant in prisons. It alters the effects of some medications. It robs people of sleep. It shortens tempers and increases violent behavior.
“It turns poorly ventilated concrete-and-steel prisons into heat-retaining ovens that don’t cool down at night. Individual fans bought at prison commissaries merely move the hot air around. Desperate residents describe clogging toilets to let the water run so they can lie in it, or soak their clothes in it, or lay their bedsheets in it… Staff, too, are affected by the unrelenting heat and are more likely to become ill or to respond aggressively to incidents.
“At sweltering, non-air-conditioned public schools, parents can at least take their children out of class. Tenants in non-cooled apartments can, at least in theory, go to the mall or an emergency cooling center during a heat wave.” So American taxpayers are paying for jails and prisons that do not rehabilitate, increase criminal expertise, result in alarming recidivism, and create super-angry and bitter inmates who are then released after serving their time… into the general public. Oh, and which literally torture those incarcerated in ways that defy any moral justification.
I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s hard to understand why taxpayers are willing to spend billions that represent pure waste, impose brutal torture… and then simply look away.
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