From Inquest:
In July of 2024, a man in Illinois’s Stateville Correctional Facility died. His death was likely due to a combination of the heat aggravating his asthma and medical neglect. The man’s cell was on the top gallery and he did not have access to a running fan, let alone air conditioning.
During the same heatwave, while locked in a different Illinois prison, I overheard officers saying that a couple of people on another deck were suffering from heat exhaustion. They didn’t die, so it didn’t make the news, but it makes me wonder how many people must be suffering the same fate across the country: slowly baking between iron bars and behind concrete walls. In Texas prisons, forty-one people died of heat during the summer of 2023 alone. On the opposite end of the weather spectrum, the Prison Journalism Project recently published a dossier of reporting from incarcerated people about suffering from terrible cold.
As Dana McKinney White and Lisa Haber-Thomson wrote in Inquest, U.S. prisons have historically been built upon a “design vocabulary of retributive justice” that continues to produce “carceral landscapes that have proven detrimental to recovery, reintegration, and broader community health.” Continue reading >>>
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