Advocates will hold a candlelight vigil Saturday at Raby Park in Gatesville for prisoners, employees and others in prison units without air conditioning who are affected by the summer heat.
“We want to raise awareness and honor those who lost their lives,” said April Towery, a spokesperson for Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, the group organizing the vigil. “The heat doesn’t just harm the inmates. It harms the corrections officers, other prison employees, volunteers and family members who visit.”
The vigil will start at 8:30 p.m. Saturday at Raby Park, 400 S. Eighth St. in Gatesville.
Towery said she hopes to bring pressure to the Texas Legislature so that a bill to air condition more units of Texas prisons will pass both houses in the next session. She was released from a Texas prison in January 2022 after serving about 19 months for an alcohol related offense, she said.
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Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson Amanda Hernandez said her agency takes its responsibility for protecting inmates, employees and the public seriously.
Seven out of eight prison units in McLennan and Coryell counties are partially air conditioned. The Cairn Unit in Gatesville, for one, is partially air conditioned, with about 790 out of its 2,100 beds in air-conditioned areas.
“TDCJ has had 13 inmate and 29 employee heat-related incidents this year,” Hernandez said by email, addressing incidents statewide. “There has not been a heat-related death since 2012.”
The previous summer, 10 inmates died of heat stroke, according to the Texas Tribune.
A state report on the July 2018 death of Robert Earl Robinson, 54, in an East Texas prison lists his cause of death as environmental hyperthermia, but prison officials have questioned the finding, saying it was based on a preliminary autopsy and that Robinson was housed in an air-conditioned area, the Texas Tribune reported.
Towery compares the heat for prisoners and prison employees in prison units without air conditioning to sitting in a parked car in the middle of summer before it cools down.
“It’s like when you go out to your car in the heat of the day and you open the door and that blast of heat comes out and you sit down before you start the car and turn on the air conditioning,” Towery said. “Except in the prisons that heat just continues all day every day.”
Towery said 97% of inmates in Texas prisons will return to society.
“The message is you have no value,” Towery said of the inadequate air conditioning. “And this message goes to the prisoners and the guards alike.”
There is a pig farm in Gatesville with climate control, Towery said.
While there are heat mitigation measures such as fans and ice water, access will be insufficient when there are thousands of inmates competing for them, Towery said.
Organizers hope Saturday’s vigil will bring attention to the goal of installing cooling systems in all Texas prison units, said Chanel Jones, an advocate with the Lioness organization who was released on parole in June 2020 after serving more than 16 years in prison.
“We want TDCJ to release those eligible for parole, so they don’t suffer in the heat for another summer,” Jones said. “We want TDCJ to close facilities in which cooling systems can’t be installed because of the way the oldest prisons were constructed.”
