Inadequate air conditioning at North Texas federal prison is ‘torture’ for those inside

As record-breaking heat broils Dallas-Fort Worth, people incarcerated in federal prisons in North Texas face potentially deadly conditions due to inadequate air conditioning, according to an advocate and family members.

FCI Seagoville, a low-security federal prison just outside Dallas, houses nearly 2,000 people in eight buildings in its main compound. Nearly all of those buildings have broken air conditioning units, resulting in dangerously hot conditions, according to three women whose loved ones are incarcerated at Seagoville and Derek Gilna, a prison advocate and former attorney.

Two of the buildings have air conditioning, while the other six buildings have barely working or completely broken air conditioning systems, the women said. Two of the women, who asked for anonymity out of fear of retaliation for their husbands, said the temperatures in the facility continue to climb.

“I keep expecting a phone call that he’s dead,” one woman from the Pacific Northwest said. “It’s torture for all the guys, but it’s torture for their families, too.”

In response to questions about the air conditioning at Seagoville, the Bureau of Prisons said everyone in the facility had access to “either air conditioning or fans.”

In an email, Emery Nelson with the bureau’s office of public affairs said the BOP is “committed and vigilant to ensure safe conditions” at the facility and monitors the ventilation at FCI Seagoville.

‘They don’t deserve to die.’

Air conditioning in state and federal prisons can be a lethal issue, especially as climate change leads to increasingly dangerous heat. At least nine inmates in Texas state prisons without AC have died this summer of heart attacks or unknown causes, the Texas Tribune reported.

According to Texas A&M’s 2022 study on extreme temperatures in state prisons, temperatures in Texas facilities can reach up to 110 degrees, and at least one unit topped 149 degrees. There is no law requiring the Bureau of Prisons to keep federal prisons at a certain temperature. According to BOP guidelines, temperatures should be about 76 degrees in hot seasons and 68 degrees in cold seasons. But the guidelines note that “due to issues such as the age of the cooling and heating systems,” those temperatures may vary.

Gilna, who is the director of research at the Federal Legal Center in Indianapolis, said over the years, he has heard more and more complaints from incarcerated people about the heat. One man incarcerated at Seagoville told Gilna the facility recently topped 100 degrees.

“The power system here is constantly failing and there are constant outages that go on multiple times daily,” an email from the man said. “Then it takes over 2 hours for them to get the power back on…This morning at 6:00 AM the temperature inside the building is over 100 degrees F.”

In an email, Nelson said supervisors at FCI Seagoville conduct daily temperature checks in housing units. The Bureau of Prisons declined to share data about those temperature checks. Nelson also said Seagoville has had “no inmate health concerns, including fainting or injuries, attributed to heat conditions.”

Those with loved ones at the facility are skeptical of that statement.

One woman, who lives in Texas, said her husband has passed out several times from the heat in his five years in federal prison, and he has watched people die from heat exhaustion. She said when people have a heat-related medical issue, the prison is “hush hush” about it, and labels it as something else.

The woman’s husband, a veteran, told her “he’s seen guys drop when he was in Iraq, but he said this is ridiculous.”

The woman from the Pacific Northwest said her husband recently woke up on the floor of his cell after passing out from the heat. He cannot sleep and has trouble eating or even breathing due to the heat, she said.

The unit her husband lives in has large industrial fans, but “they’re just blowing hot air around,” she said. To try and cool off, men stand in long lines to take cold showers and try to move around as little as possible, the woman said. The facilities have windows, but many of them do not open all the way or at all.

Staff give people in the unit a half cup of ice each day for hydration, the woman said. The unit has a water and ice dispenser, but the water out of the dispenser is hot and people are limited in how much ice they can get, she said. Fights break out around the dispensers frequently, making it difficult to get access, she said.

“I could go on and on about the injustices going on there, but the most important thing is this heat,” the woman from the Pacific Northwest said. “It’s just absolutely miserable and it’s deadly. They don’t deserve to die.”

Sharon Cohn said her son, Jacob Kolonis, is incarcerated at Seagoville and has struggled with the heat. He said the ice runs out quickly and not everyone is able to get enough.

“He basically told me that animals are treated better,” Cohn said. “I’m appalled at the treatment of these incarcerated men. I know that they are all there for a reason but they are all still human beings.”

The Bureau of Prisons said incarcerated people at Seagoville have access to drinking water and air conditioning. In the event there are concerns about heat conditions, Nelson said a “contingency plan” will be implemented. In a follow-up email, Benjamin O’Cone with the office of public affairs did not provide details about that plan, saying the bureau’s contingency plans are “sensitive in nature and not available to the public.”

BOP-wide issue

The lack of adequate air conditioning at Seagoville is a symptom of systemic failures in the justice system, Gilna said. Gilna pointed to the Department of Justice’s poorly planned budget, a lack of accountability and chronic understaffing in the Bureau of Prisons as contributors to the crisis in federal prisons.

“This is just one layer of the level of incompetence in the federal prison system,” he said. “The level of incompetence is just staggering.”

Federal prisons are a nightmare from an infrastructure standpoint. Many are old and difficult to maintain; FCI Seagoville was originally constructed in 1940. In a 2020 Detention Facility Infrastructure report, the Bureau of Prisons addressed concerns about HVAC failures and noted that “prisons built 80 years ago are not readily configured to meet the programming requirements of today and are not easily retrofitted with the latest technologies.”

According to the Department of Justice, neither the Bureau of Prisons or Congress are doing enough to tackle infrastructure problems.

In May, the Office of the Inspector General analyzed the bureau’s maintenance and construction efforts in an audit. The report concluded the BOP’s infrastructure is a mess. Photos of corroded ceilings, leaking equipment and pervasive flooding at facilities across the country exemplify this issue.

But one of the most troubling areas the report found was issues with air conditioning. The report focused on three institutions, and auditors found housing units with faulty or no air conditioning at two of the three facilities.

Fixing air conditioning in federal facilities is a multi-million dollar problem.

From 2017 to 2021, the Bureau of Prisons allotted $64 million to fixing HVACs. That falls far short of the necessary amount; a Department of Justice report estimated $212 million would be needed to fix HVACs across the system.

The report criticized Congress’ decision to set aside over $1 billion for the bureau to build two new institutions instead of allocating money to fix languishing facilities. Those funds have been largely unspent; the new facilities have been in the initial planning stages for over a decade. The BOP has asked Congress to cancel one of the projects, but Congress has not done so.

Those barriers give people with loved ones in federal facilities little hope of resolution.

“For his entire five-year sentence, he most likely will never see air conditioning,” the woman from the Pacific Northwest said about her husband. “I’m worried constantly. When I don’t hear from him, I automatically assume the worst from the heat.”

Advocates have long been raising awareness about heat-related conditions in prisons. Most recently, efforts in Texas focused on state-run facilities. In this legislative session, the Texas House proposed to spend $545 million to install air conditioning units in many of the prisons, but the Senate nixed the proposition. In the state’s final budget proposal, $85.7 million was granted to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for “deferred maintenance,” which may or may not include air conditioning maintenance.