(30 Jul 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Austin, Texas – 30 July 2024
1. Various exteriors of United States Courthouse
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Marci Marie Simmons, Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance:
“So, I experienced very harsh conditions because of the heat in the summer months. I experienced things like loss of appetite, dizziness, an inability to sleep at night. I was forced to take measures into my own hands, trying to, to cool off my body temperature. Things like wearing wet clothes, even flushing the toilet several times so the water gets cold and splashing toilet water on my body.”
++BLACK FRAMES++
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Marci Marie Simmons, Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance:
“Very dangerous. People are getting sick and even dying because of the dangerous temperatures.”
++BLACK FRAMES++
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Marci Marie Simmons, Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance:
“The last summer that I was incarcerated, which was 2020, 2020, that summer. There was a thermometer in our dorm that was pretty high up. It had a piece of electrical tape over that thermometer so we couldn’t read the reading. The maintenance crew would come in with their ladder and look at it. We decided we wanted to know how hot it was.”
++BLACK FRAMES++
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Marci Marie Simmons, Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance:
“When I peeled back that electrical tape. The reading on that thermometer was 136 degrees Fahrenheit in the dorm where I was living, with 101 other women.”
++BLACK FRAMES++
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Marci Marie Simmons, Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance:
“I was panicked. It frightened me. It also made me feel a little bit justified in knowing how I was feeling, that I wasn’t crazy, that it was that hot.”
++BLACK FRAMES++
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Marci Marie Simmons, Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance:
“They would cut themselves or overdose on medication and have their bunkie tell the officer or staff so that they could get taken to the crisis management center, which is air conditioned. They wanted relief from the heat and they were desperate for it.”
++BLACK FRAMES++
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Marci Marie Simmons, Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance:
“With the climate changes, we are going to see even more heat related illnesses and deaths. It’s a very scary future.”
++ENDS ON SOUNDBITE++
STORYLINE:
Describing Texas prisons as so hot that inmates cool off by splashing themselves with toilet water or faking suicide attempts to get moved to cooler medical areas, advocates on Tuesday asked a federal judge to declare the state prison system’s lack of air conditioning as unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
Tuesday began a multi-day hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to force Texas to fully air condition a prison system that houses more than 130,000 inmates, but has full AC in only about a third of its 100 prison units. The rest have partial or no air-conditioning.
Inmate advocacy groups allege that temperatures inside can push above 120 degrees Fahrenheit (48.9 Celsius), and that the extreme heat has led to hundreds of inmate deaths in recent years. They want U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman to require Texas to maintain temperatures in prison housing and occupied areas between 65 and 85 degrees F (18 and 29 degrees Celsius), the same temperature range required by law in county jails.
“I was panicked. It frightened me. It also made me feel a little bit justified in knowing how I was feeling that I wasn’t crazy, that it was that hot,” Simmons said.
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