Though it may not look like it, the world as we know it is in a free fall, steadily spiraling into climate catastrophe. Earlier this month, a defeated United Nations even issued a report preparing the world “to face the inevitability of exceeding global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius” above pre-industrial levels in the years ahead.
Exceeding that benchmark comes with epoch-defining consequences: mass displacement due to climate disasters, economic turmoil from disrupted supply chains, and widespread loss of biodiversity, among others. Each of those consequences manifests in hundreds of both concrete and increasingly novel ways. Just one of those ghoulish effects: the urgent threat that extreme heat poses to incarcerated people, whose safety and wellbeing often rank among the lowest priorities for governments scrambling to juggle the many crises of our time.
In Italy, for example, record summer heat has turned hundreds of detention centers into de facto torture chambers. As the New York Times reports, temperatures inside prison cells across the Italian peninsula have regularly exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit, choking detainees, staff and visitors alike.
Because Italy’s 200-some carceral centers lack air conditioning, let alone basic fans and ventilation systems, the unprecedented heat has placed a “significant strain on correctional facilities, exacerbating pre-existing logistical problems,” according to a report by Italian prison watchdog Antigone.
That’s on top of Italy’s ongoing crisis of prison overcrowding — according to the NYT, the country has almost 65,000 inmates held in custody, despite a housing capacity of 47,000.
Unfortunately, relief seems unlikely, both in the immediate-term and in the hot years ahead. As head of Italy’s penitentiary administration department Stefano Carmine De Michele admitted in a July press conference, air conditioning isn’t even “being considered” for the country’s prisons.
That would probably be the route the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) would prefer to take. Instead, the agency is being ordered to install air conditioning throughout the states’ detention facilities — though not until 2029 — after a federal judge ruled that the current lack of air conditioning constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, the Texas Tribune reported.
“In the face of clear evidence of risk — including ongoing injuries, deaths, and suffering every summer — [TDCJ] Director Lumpkin’s failure to enact a meaningful, committed plan to install air-conditioning on the timeline that TDCJ has repeatedly indicated is possible is deliberate indifference,” the presiding judge declared.
As the Tribune notes, an estimated 23 people have died from heat-related causes between 1998 and 2012 in Texas custody, in addition to 10 deaths from 2022 and 2025. It remains to be seen whether the TDCJ will honor the federally-mandated timeline, but as record-breaking summer heat becomes the norm, the situation for those in custody has become far too urgent.
More on climate change: United Nations Concedes That Efforts to Arrest Climate Change Have Failed, and the Planet Is Now Spiraling Into Environmental Catastrophe
