Prison guard shortfall makes it harder for inmates to get reprieve from extreme heat, critics say

The day before Patrick Womack was found face-down and unresponsive in a hot prison cell in August 2023, he asked a correctional officer to let him take a cold shower so he could cool down.

The officer said no, according to court documents. The reason: There weren’t enough guards at the H.H. Coffield Unit to watch him.

Attorneys for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice who are trying to dissuade a federal judge from forcing the state to cool its un-air conditioned prisons argue in an ongoing lawsuit that the state already provides incarcerated people with unlimited access to cold showers, ice water and air-conditioned respite areas.

But current and former prisoners, advocates and a former guard claim the prison system isn’t following through on those promises. In hearing testimony, documents and interviews with The Texas Tribune, they say a persistent staffing shortage leaves lock-ups without enough guards needed to mitigate against the heat inside un-air conditioned prisons, which reach well over 100 degrees during the summer. The prison system’s critics say that leaves incarcerated individuals without access to respite, ice water or cool showers.

“The excuse is always we are understaffed,” one of Womack’s cellmates told investigators, according to court documents. The cellmate noted there was “nothing unusual” about prison guards denying an inmate a cold shower.

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“This place ain’t for humans,” the cellmate said. “Of course people are going to die.”

Texas inmates and nonprofit groups are suing the state over the blistering heat inside its prisons, asking an Austin judge to declare the conditions unconstitutional and require Texas to keep temperatures under 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Complying with such a ruling — which could come at any time following a hearing last month — could cost the state more than $1 billion, officials have said.

Bryan Collier, the executive director of TDCJ, admitted during a hearing last month that inmates are “not necessarily consistently” getting access to water. There are “instances probably where we don’t meet everything we are supposed to meet,” Collier said.

And state officials say understaffing is not a valid excuse for failing to follow protocols meant to protect prisoners. Teams of auditors, called strike teams, visit the prisons unannounced to ensure mitigation tactics are carried out. If they aren’t, the problem is immediately rectified, TDCJ spokesperson Amanda Hernandez said in an email.

Judge Robert Pitman is expected to imminently decide whether the state must embark on the costly and time intensive project of installing air conditioning in all of its prisons. Currently, 66% of Texas prison beds are not in air-conditioned areas. The lawsuit comes after the Texas House last year committed to spending $545 million to install air conditioning, only to have the proposal shot down in the more conservative Senate.

From 2001 to 2019, as many as 271 inmates may have died because of extreme heat, according to a 2022 study. The state has not reported a heat-related death in 12 years, but Collier acknowledged in court that high temperatures “contributed” to the deaths of three inmates last summer, even though heat was not listed as the primary cause of death in those inmates’ death reports. The department differentiates between deaths where heat was the primary cause of death and those where heat was a contributing factor.

“There’s no amount of respite rooms, ice water and cold showers that can keep people safe from triple digit temperatures,” said Erica Grossman, an attorney who is representing prison advocacy groups. “Even if they could implement them — which they don’t — it’s not sufficient. It’s not a complicated solution. Install air-conditioning.”

As a judge considers whether Texas’ efforts to mitigate the indoor heat is enough, the people working and living inside scorching prison cells say they feel the impacts of understaffing compounding the physical conditions. About 24% of the 24,112 correctional officer positions in Texas prisons are vacant, Hernandez said.

The agency is amping up its recruitment and retention efforts, holding job fairs across the state — including in high schools — and dramatically increasing correctional officers’ starting salaries and career development.

But even more guards, some critics say, doesn’t solve all of the problems the lack of air conditioning creates.

“Staff are being held to give inmates respite, but the staff aren’t getting respite themselves,” said Jeff Ormsby, a former correctional officer who now serves as executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Texas Corrections unit, a union that advocates for Texas correctional officers. “Working in pods or wings with several hundred inmates, they don’t get a break.”

Scouring for water

During the summer months, Marci Marie Simmons says she receives dozens of letters and phone calls from Texas inmates who describe miserable days in sweltering heat without cold water or respite.

Simmons was incarcerated in Texas prisons from 2011 until 2021 and now leads the Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for inmates. The group is one of the plaintiffs in the ongoing legal battle against the state, arguing the lack of air conditioning amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

Simmons said that when she was incarcerated, she would often scour for water, wait days for a cold shower and be denied respite because there weren’t enough guards to take inmates there.

Simmons recalled officers quitting during the summer months, or saving all of their paid time off for the hottest days of the year.

“They would joke about it and say, ‘You know I don’t work in August,’” Simmons said.

And she didn’t blame them for it.

“Nobody wants to work in an un-air conditioned metal and concrete building in full uniform,” she said.

Hernandez, the TDCJ spokesperson, declined to comment on the department’s vacation policies. But she said staff shortages are not a valid excuse for not carrying out mitigation efforts.

Strike teams

The department investigates allegations that mitigation measures are not taking place by using information collected from “strike teams” who visit prisons unannounced every week and evaluate whether officers are compliant with heat protocols. If a problem is identified, it is rectified, Hernandez said.

This year, strike teams have conducted 28 reviews and identified one issue, Hernandez said, though she did not specify the issue they uncovered. Inmates, meanwhile, have filed thousands of grievances, many of them about the failure to follow mitigation protocols.

Rectifying those problems with insufficient staff is a tough problem to solve.

Altee Johnson, who worked as a correctional officer from 2018 until 2020, said it was common for her fellow staff members to quit after working a few weeks on the job and that the shortages made it more difficult for her and her coworkers to do their required tasks, perpetuating the cycle of high staff turnover.

Without enough staff around, Johnson said she was forced to stay overtime, sometimes working 16-hour shifts in hot temperatures.

“It was miserable,” Johnson said. “It was definitely inhumane.”

In 2022 and 2023, TDCJ staff filed close to 80 workers’ compensation claims related to the heat, according to court documents.

Adding to the challenges, Johnson said, were that areas designated for “respite” were not large enough to accommodate everyone who wanted to cool down.

“Sometimes they’d have 30 to 40 women in the vestibule, where it’s only big enough for 10,” she said. “That created tension and fights. They would just get aggravated.”

Eventually, Johnson resigned.

“On the brink of failure”

During the pandemic, TDCJ created mobile correction officer teams who travel to units that are understaffed, which are typically located in remote parts of the state.

The department also began overstaffing prisons in urban areas and sending the extra staff to understaffed prisons. Prison staff in Houston, for example, travel to Beaumont, and Dallas staff might travel to Texarkana facilities. Sometimes staff are transported each day. Other times they are stationed in nearby hotels for four-day cycles.

“We’ve adjusted our entire strategy on the operations of TDCJ,” said Jeremy Bryant, the agency’s director of recruitment.

Bryant said he sees this as a temporary solution and hopes that doubling down on recruitment and retention will help solve the staffing crisis.

Ormsby, the union executive, said officers don’t like working in the facilities without air conditioning and that having to travel to those facilities adds an extra burden on staff who are already spread thin.

“They are putting people in vans and shipping them to work in these units,” Ormsby said. “They might make you travel two hours to Palestine to work a 12-hour shift in an un-air conditioned unit.”

At the same time, TDCJ staff said they are looking for ways to become more efficient. For example, the department has experimented with new perimeter security systems that use microwave technology and would not require an officer to man the fence.

“We are doing our best to fill these positions, but we are going to get to a point where there’s no one to fill them with,” Hernandez said. “How can we do more with less staff? That has to be one of our focuses.”

The staffing shortage mirrors a nationwide pattern that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, when fears of contracting the virus in communal settings coupled with strict isolation policies pushed thousands of corrections staff to quit their jobs.

The number of people employed by state prisons fell to its lowest point in more than two decades in 2022, according to U.S. census data. As a result, the remaining correctional officers are often forced to work overtime, creating dangerous and sometimes violent conditions.

“We have a system on the brink of failure,” John Wetzel, former Pennsylvania Secretary of Corrections, testified during a U.S. Senate hearing earlier this year focused on the nation’s correctional staffing challenges. “And it’s a system we all need.”

Heat sensitivity scores

Womack was 50 years old when he died last year inside of Coffield, a men’s prison in unincorporated Anderson County. According to the official custodial death report, Womack died of hyperthermia due to serotonin syndrome. That syndrome, the report says, was caused by sertraline, a common antidepressant medication Womack was prescribed. Environmental heat was noted as a possible contributing factor, but not the primary cause of death.

During last month’s court hearing, Susi Vassallo, an emergency medicine doctor who specializes in heat sensitivity, testified that the amount of sertraline in Womack’s system would not have caused him to have a core body temperature of 107 degrees, as was reported in his autopsy report. Vassallo said she believes Womack died from a heat stroke.

“The heat index was 113, that’s the cause of death here,” Vassallo said, adding that had Womack been housed in air conditioning, he wouldn’t have died.

As part of a court settlement in 2018, TDCJ worked with medical professionals to create a “heat sensitivity score” to determine which inmates are placed in cool beds. That score is created and constantly updated using an algorithm designed by physicians at the University of Texas Medical Branch and Texas Tech University, using inputs from an inmate’s electronic health record. The algorithm is supposed to figure out who is at greater risk of heat sensitivity.

But advocates and some medical experts say the algorithm is ineffective, leaving plenty of people sensitive to the heat in un-air conditioned cells.

Despite being prescribed sertraline and having a history of mental health disorders, Womack did not have a heat sensitivity score.

“Heat sensitivity scores are calculated based on a multitude of factors, such as age, medical condition and prescriptions,” Hernandez, the spokesperson, said. She added that having a prescription of sertraline would not in itself qualify someone for a heat score.

Neither would having hypertension as a 90-year-old, or having diabetes, according to court testimony.

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This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.