Extreme heat inside prisons is dangerous to incarcerated people and prison staff, potentially exacerbating staffing shortages that are more dire than official statistics might suggest: That’s one of the big takeaways for reporters from an Aug. 6 webinar hosted by The Journalist’s Resource and The Marshall Project.
“When it rains in prison, we all get wet, whether you have the keys or you don’t have the keys,” said Brian Dawe, national director of One Voice United, an advocacy organization for correctional officers. “We’re all impacted by the environmental conditions within those walls. And we should all be concerned about everybody behind those walls.”
Extreme heat can lead to heatstroke, organ problems and even death. Older prisons, including some built before the 20th century that are still in use, are unlikely to have heat mitigation systems.
Most prisons and jails across the country don’t have full air conditioning, Dawe said. He discussed staffing and environmental issues inside prisons along with:
- Wilfredo Laracuente, a workforce development specialist with Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow. Laracuente was incarcerated for 20 years in the maximum-security Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. He discussed his experiences with heat and staffing issues while behind bars.
- David Eads, data editor for The Marshall Project. He talked about resources for journalists covering heat and staffing issues in prisons.
- Naseem Miller, The Journalist’s Resource senior health editor. She shared research on how heat affects the human body.
Laracuente and Dawe acknowledged that the public might not have much sympathy for incarcerated people experiencing extreme heat. And staffing issues, including retaining qualified correctional officers, are largely under-covered in the news media.
But the topic is personal for many Americans. Nearly half of Americans have had an immediate family member incarcerated, according to survey research published in the peer-reviewed journal Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World.
“[Prison is] supposed to be a tad bit uncomfortable, not inhumane,” Laracuente said. “I want to go ahead and double down on that. It’s not supposed to be inhumane.”
And Dawe noted that understaffed prisons and extreme heat affect incarcerated people and correctional officers alike. Keep reading for four things journalists should know to bolster their coverage of under-staffing and dangerous heat in prisons.
1. Know the research on how heat affects the human body — and the changing demographics making prison populations more vulnerable to heat.
There is a wealth of research available on how extreme heat affects the human body.
Heat is sometimes called a “silent killer,” Miller said, and heat stress is the leading cause of weather-related deaths worldwide. Extreme heat affects the body’s ability to cool itself — when the body heats too rapidly, fluid and salt is lost through dehydration and sweating, causing the body’s internal temperature to rise.
The average normal body temperature is about 98 F. When the body is unable to regulate its internal temperature due to factors like extreme heat, the risk of heat exhaustion and heatstroke increases.
“The strain put on the body as it tries to cool itself also stresses the heart and kidneys,” according to the World Health Organization. “As a result, heat extremes can worsen health risks from chronic conditions (cardiovascular, mental, respiratory and diabetes related conditions) and cause acute kidney injury.”
Academic research has identified links between extreme heat and higher mortality and suicide rates in state and private prisons.
People with mental health conditions are also more vulnerable to extreme heat, research has found. A 2022 study in JAMA Psychiatry analyzed nearly 3.5 million emergency department visits across the U.S. from 2010 to 2019 and found higher temperatures were associated with more emergency visits for people with mental health conditions.
The Marshall Project’s list of studies on heat in prisons
People with schizophrenia may be particularly vulnerable to extreme heat. Among other factors, the condition can affect the body’s ability to regulate its temperature and some antipsychotic medications raise the body’s internal temperature, research has found.
Older adults are also at greater risk of being affected or even dying from extreme heat, and prison populations in the U.S. are aging rapidly, according to a 2023 paper in the Journal of Gerontological Nursing, U.S. Census Bureau data and news reports.
“Just to remind you who’s at risk, really it falls into two categories,” Miller said. Those are physiological factors, such as age and chronic conditions, along with factors that may be difficult for people to control, such as where they live or work.
2. Know that you have to dig beyond official statistics, such as staffing ratios.
Official statistics might not be wrong, but they might not be telling the full story, either.
For example, when it comes to figuring out how many security staff there are per inmate in a given system or prison, journalists should dig into whether staffing ratios mesh with reality. Search for or ask about staffing ratios, Dawe said.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons has an inmate-to-staff ratio of 9-to-1 across its system, according to a 2023 report to Congress, which notes that ratio could have “a very different meaning” when considering that staff work varying shifts. The report includes the number of staff available by shift, by facility.
Dawe offered a hypothetical example of a prison system providing data showing a 5-1 ratio of inmates to security staff at one of its facilities.
“Say there’s a thousand people incarcerated, 200 security staff, you would get a ratio of 5-to-1,” Dawe said.
But, he added, that ratio assumes all security staff work every day around the clock. Yet in the real world, only about 65% of staff are available on any given day, Dawe said.
Applying that to the hypothetical example would lower the available staff from 200 to 130 — which ups the staffing ratio from 5-to-1 to 8-to-1.
Then, there are usually three shifts per day, Dawe said.
Dividing 130 by three brings the number of staff actually working at any given time in this hypothetical scenario to about 43, and a staffing ratio of 23-to-1.
That’s probably closer to reality but could still be off by a wide margin, Dawe said.
He recalled inmate-to-staff ratios of 44-to-1 when he started as a correctional officer in 1982.
“If you were to go around this country and tell any correctional officer that the staffing ratio is 9-to-1 or 5-to-1, they’d laugh in your face,” Dawe said.
It’s a reminder to reporters to not just know official statistics, but also how they were derived.
Eads noted that prison staffing has declined substantially in recent years; no other state-level job has had bigger employment losses from 2019 to 2023.
Older prisons without cooling systems may be exacerbating the trend, and there could be issues with how deaths are recorded in prison systems.
“We know that heat deaths are underreported, it might be written down as asthma or a pulmonary problem, diabetes,” Eads said. “But we could guess that the causal trigger is somebody overheated.”
3. Know that journalists can help identify major concerns, such as extreme heat, happening inside prisons.
Laracuente noted that in his conversations with incarcerated people and their families, he’s learned that they often feel no one is listening to their concerns about prison conditions.
Journalists, he added, can play a role by gathering those concerns and stories and identifying and reporting on common themes.
Laracuente also noted that rules about heat mitigation vary by facility. Journalists can learn those rules — and how they play out within prison walls — by talking to prison administrators and currently or recently incarcerated people, or by visiting prisons during peak heat months, if possible.
“Talking to facilities, understanding their heat policies, do they have [air conditioning] in housing units? That’s an incredibly important question to be asking,” Eads said. “Advocates may be suing; sources might have people on the inside.”
Some prison administrations might allow a single clip-on fan for individual cooling, Laracuente said. Others might offer two Styrofoam cups of ice per day. “That’s gone in about 2.5 seconds on a normal 85-degree day,” Laracuente said.
“It’s good to lean on lived experience when you’re talking about these particular conditions,” he added. “Because that’s where you’re going to get the real insight.”
4. Know that the Marshall Project’s Investigate This! toolkits will give you a leg up.
Investigate This! toolkits are aimed at providing practical advice and resources for journalists interested in investigating a range of issues in prisons.
They include illustrations, data visualizations and curated lists of sources.
The toolkits also offer embeddable charts on staffing and notable state-level lawsuits that have been filed related to heat in prisons.
“We know very well, covering this nationally, that most of the criminal justice system is happening at the county level, at the court level — at the local level,” Eads said.
Check out the Investigate This! toolkits on prison staffing trends and dangerous heat in prisons to kickstart investigations into those topics.
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