Employees from at least one Texas prison falsified temperature logs that officials are required to use to decide when extreme heat poses risks to inmates and guards, according to Austin public radio station KUT.
KUT’s report is based on an internal state investigation prompted by a federal that argues the lack of air conditioning in two-thirds of Texas prisons amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and has led to inmates deaths and health problems.
The report cited by KUT found prison staff at the Mark W. Stiles Unit in Beaumont “recreated” logs from the summer of 2022 that were missing or had been marked over by the lockup’s employees. The temperatures filled in by workers were “far off” from those officially recorded on those days, according to the analysis. In one case cited by the radio station, the temperature in the daily logbook was nearly 18 degrees lower from weather data.
What’s more, the warden and other top officials at the Stiles Unit likely knew about the sham record keeping, investigators wrote.
The prisons’ record of daily temperature readings are vital because they can help officials determine whether to implement emergency protocols such as providing inmates with fans, cold showers are additional water, according to KUT.
Prisoners and advocacy groups have accused the state of covering up deaths of prisoners whom they argue have cooked in their cells as summer temperatures regularly rise above the century mark. Although a 2023 Texas Tribune analysis estimates that there were at least 41 heat-related deaths in state prisons last year, Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials denied there’s been a heat-related fatality since 2012.
The internal investigation was requested by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman, who’s presiding over the federal suit over the lack of air conditioning in Texas lockups. Despite strict temperature regulations for county jails and even animal shelters, no such regulations limit how hot or cold Texas prisons can get.
During scorching summer days, Texas inmates sometimes resort to soaking their clothes and bedsheets in toilet water in attempt to cool their bodies, as reported by the Current.
Last August, Pitman demanded state officials examine the accuracy of the Stiles Unit’s logs after he called them into question, KUT reports. In one case, the records showed temperatures at the un-airconditioned facility reached no higher than 79 degrees during a mid-July day in 2022.
“This is not a mistake. This is a fabricated document,” Pitman said from the bench, according to the radio station. “Somebody needs to look into this.”
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This article appears in Mar 19 – Apr 1, 2025.