Stifling heat has killed inmates and exacerbated employee turnover in Texas prisons. But funding for air conditioning was whittled down in the draft budget released Thursday.
in wrongful death and civil rights lawsuits. More than two-thirds of Texas’ 100 prisons don’t have air conditioning in most living areas, forcing thousands of prison officers and tens of thousands of prisoners to work and live in sweltering conditions.— a hefty sum, though a relative drop in the bucket in the state budget — to cover two phases of a four-phase plan to install air conditioning in all Texas prisons by 2031. But the Senate dashed those hopes, offering no money for the purpose.
The House’s proposal would have spent $225.9 million to cool 16 facilities by 2025, focusing on transfer facilities, which hold newly sentenced prisoners, and those with large special needs populations, according to a TDCJ draft plan. Phase 2 would have used $319.3 million to air condition another 30 facilities by 2027, focusing on larger prisons built in the 1980s and 1990s.
In Thursday’s final budget proposal, lawmakers had added the additional $85.7 million “deferred maintenance” funding in the miscellaneous budget section. Though lawmakers didn’t explicitly say the money was for air conditioning, the money falls under the same budget category from which TDCJ pulls funds to install air conditioning.
Even if the entirety of the $85.7 million is used for air conditioning, it’s unclear exactly how many beds or units it would cool. TDCJ and the Legislative Budget Board have estimated that cooling prisons would cost between $620,000 to $48 million per facility, depending on the prison.TDCJ agreeing to install air conditioning
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