We know it's hot.īLANKENSHIP: And Cain says that's a problem for correctional officers, too.ĬAIN: Well, you know, some people can't stand that heat anyway, and they don't want to work in it.īLANKENSHIP: Prisons across the South struggle to keep even a minimally safe number of correctional officers. The federal Department of Justice has been looking for Eighth Amendment violations in Southern prisons, including those run by Cain, for years.ĬAIN: Yeah, they've already said it about it being hot, hot, hot. It doesn't mean lock and feed, torture and torment.īLANKENSHIP: During the long career of Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Burling Cain, federal courts have found that even just the threat of illness and violence from heat is a civil rights violation.ĬAIN: And so then, pretty soon it violates the Eighth Amendment, you could say.īLANKENSHIP: The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution protects against cruel and unusual punishment. Annually, that's about 4,000 violent acts in prisons across the country.īURLING CAIN: Corrections means correct deviant behavior. Mukherjee and Sanders say when a day in prison is that hot, expect about 20% more acts of extreme violence than on a temperate day.

That problem is concentrated at prisons in 13 states in the South and Southwest. MUKHERJEE: What generates a response in violence is days averaging 80 degrees or more.īLANKENSHIP: On a day like that, Mukherjee says it could easily top 100 degrees inside a prison when there's no air conditioning or places to cool down.

So the question that we started out with is, what is the effect of, let's say, a hot day versus a moderate temperature day on acts of violence in prison.īLANKENSHIP: Mukherjee and her co-researcher, Nicholas Sanders of Cornell University, used some sophisticated math to isolate heat from some 52 other variables in eight years of data from the Mississippi Department of Corrections. She says that Georgia pattern mirrors what she found in a Mississippi study.ĪNITA MUKHERJEE: Yeah. That pattern of homicides peaking on the hottest days repeats itself across the Georgia prison system at least as far back as 2015.Īnita Mukherjee is an assistant professor in the business school at the University of Wisconsin. Two of those three July deaths were ruled homicides. Phillips State Prison saw its first deaths this year in July, typically the hottest month of the year in Georgia. LINTON: You know, he doesn't - he very rarely leaves his room because it's so exhausting for him to even walk from his room to the shower.īLANKENSHIP: The direct threat to physical health from heat is well-documented, but prison heat presents another danger too - homicides. And while Linton says that's tough enough for her 22-year-old son, his roommate is 80. Linton's son is at Phillips State Prison, one of two in the Georgia system with no air conditioning at all. The others are only partially cooled, maybe in a single dormitory. How long do you think that ice is lasting?īLANKENSHIP: Only a quarter of Georgia's prisons are fully air conditioned. How much ice left?īLANKENSHIP: Dana Smallwood Linton says, like these men, this is how her son is meant to stay cool in his prison.ĭANA SMALLWOOD LINTON: It's 90 degrees inside. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: It's been one minute. It ain't been nothing but 30 seconds.īLANKENSHIP: As the camera pulls back, you see it's an ice cooler parked on a prison block. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I just came in here. GRANT BLANKENSHIP, BYLINE: In a cell phone video shared by a Georgia prison rights activist, a group of mostly shirtless men are bent over a big black cart. And as Grant Blankenship of Georgia Public Broadcasting explains, they might take a look at the heat. Department of Justice is investigating prisons in some southern states, trying to get to the root of persistent violence. But many people in prisons don't have that option. To keep our cool this summer, most of us are probably choosing to spend more time in air conditioned spaces.

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