Texas inmates are 'being cooked to death' in state prisons, advocacy groups allege in suit

A coalition of advocates has joined one of Texas' most famous inmates to sue the state over extreme temperatures in prison cells, arguing in federal court that inmates are "being cooked to death" and staff members are suffering heat-related injuries without air conditioning.

Bernhardt Tiede II — a former funeral director whose murder of a wealthy 81-year-old widow is chronicled in Richard Linklater's film "Bernie" — first filed the lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in August 2023 after suffering an acute medical crisis in a cell that staff members had recorded reaching 112 degrees just days earlier.

Tiede, 65, was transferred to an air-conditioned cell after a judge for the Western District of Texas granted two temporary restraining orders and one extension last year, but he has no guarantee that he will be housed in a cell with climate control again.

Monday's amended complaint, which expands the lawsuit to apply to inmates beyond Tiede, asks the U.S. District Court to declare TDCJ's prison policy unconstitutional and order that Texas state prisons maintain temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees. Texas jails have been required to house prisoners at those temperatures since 1994, and federal prisons also strictly regulate temperatures.

"Let's ensure that no one else — inmates or corrections officers — suffers these inhumane conditions," Linklater said Monday at a news conference in support of the lawsuit.

Almost 70% of TDCJ prisons lack air conditioning, according to the filing, and units routinely reach 100 degrees or higher. A 2022 study by the JAMA Network found that "approximately 13% of deaths in Texas prisons during warm months between 2001 and 2019 may be attributable to extreme heat days."

The complaint described inmates resorting to extreme measures to stay cool in sweltering conditions, including flooding their cells with toilet water and lying in it.

The Legislature in 2023 allocated $85 million for TDCJ to install more air conditioning, but that money will not cover climate control in all prisons. Several bills aiming to mandate that TDCJ maintain its cells at a safe temperature range in recent years have failed.

State Rep. Carl Sherman, D-DeSoto, attributed the lack of legislation regulating prison temperatures to a lack of compassion.

"We had the resources with $32.7 billion in budget surplus," he said. "We just didn't have the will. ... If we're going to be true to our fidelity to the gospel, we must appropriate the resources."

Michele Deitch, a professor who runs the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas, added that the problem extends to staff members and suggested the lack of air conditioning contributes to Texas' struggle to fill vacancies at state prisons.

"It's not just incarcerated people who are suffering," she said. "Day after day, (staffers) have to work under unbearable conditions. ... Is it no wonder they don't want to work in those conditions?"

Advocacy groups that joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs Monday are Texas Prisons Community Advocates, Justice Impacted Women's Alliance, Texas Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants and the Coalition for Texans with Disabilities.

TDCJ did not respond to the American-Statesman's questions Monday afternoon about the lawsuit and its efforts to improve heat conditions.

Civil rights attorney Jeff Edwards noted that his and other firms have been fighting TDCJ since 2011, after 10 inmates died of heat strokes over one summer, something that "takes an incredible amount of incompetence and indifference" to let happen, he said.

"This lawsuit is about fixing what should have been fixed years ago, truly decades ago," he said.

Editor’s note: This article previously misspelled the name of Michele Deitch. It has been updated with the correct spelling.