Image by Grant Durr.

In the dorms, there’s a water fountain, but it’s always warm because many mouths are slurping the cold water greedily. Sweat beads off the dorm’s sticky walls. Men pass out on their racks when the heat overcomes them. At Lawtey CI, they brought a stretcher to carry men out. It’s 90 degrees outside, plus the Florida humidity, and it’s routinely over 100. Floridians are used to the sweltering heat.

This is different.

The dorms I lived in were open-bay, housing 80 to 120 men in a single room. A hundred-plus men, without AC. Our own body heat was part of the equation.

Confinement is worse. Confinement is where you feel as if you’re your own puddle of sweat on the floor, with a metal sink attached to the toilet, where we’d sip water like we’re fish trying to breathe out of the water.

I served eight and a half years in the Florida Department of Corrections, from 2010 to 2018, at Lake Butler RMC, Suwannee CI Annex, Taylor CI Main Unit and Annex, Lawtey CI, and Baker CI. CI stands for correctional institution, which is what Florida calls most of its prisons. Florida State Prison is the only major institution with “prison” in its name. I’ve been home for eight years now. In September, a federal judge in Texas ruled that holding prisoners in extreme heat without air conditioning is unconstitutional, and in Florida, a lawsuit over the heat in one prison, whoops, “Correctional Institution,” is headed to trial in Miami.

On September 22, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ordered Texas to air-condition every one of its prisons by the end of 2029. He found that at least nine people died from the heat in Texas prisons between 2023 and 2025, and he wrote that even without deaths or injuries, the extreme heat “creates degrading, inhumane conditions and causes severe suffering.”

His order covers about 90,000 people, nearly two-thirds of the state’s prisoners. Texas has required its county jails to stay at 85 degrees or below since 1994, but it never required that of its prisons. The case started with Bernie Tiede, the man Jack Black played in the movie “Bernie,” who suffered a stroke in the summer of 2023 in a cell that court documents say regularly exceeded 110 degrees. Texas has appealed........

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