Cell block hot: how prisoners are facing rising temperatures

By Nick Hacheney and Tomas Keen

It’s August 2022. The meteorologist says we’re in for another hot one – the latest sweltering day in what’s becoming a two-week heatwave – so we’re out before 8am to water the worm bins and set up a sprinkler in the chicken yard. With temperatures already in the 70s (21-27°C), just dragging out the hose feels like a Herculean challenge. Skeeter, a heavily tattooed, self-described “extreme” environmental activist in his 40s, manages the nearby greenhouse. “It might hit 115°F inside here today,” he says.

Pausing to wipe our brows and untuck our shirts, we notice that the peaks of the Olympic mountain range, normally capped with snow, have become increasingly bare. The surrounding landscape in the Pacific Northwest is usually a lush green at this time of year. Now, everywhere beyond a sprinkler’s arc is burnt brown and crunches like wafers underfoot.

About an hour up the road, at the Seattle campuses of Microsoft, Amazon and Google, people sit in rooms that are aggressively air-conditioned. But here at the Washington Corrections Centre, the prison where we are housed, cool air can be as hard to come by as a pardon. (Nick was jailed for murder in 2002 and has been fighting that conviction for 20 years; I was convicted in 2010 of first-degree assault, possession of a firearm and two counts of possession of a stolen vehicle.)

We don’t have air conditioning in the unit, so prisoners go shirtless in preparation for rising temperatures. “There’s not a lot we can do”, says Juan, a young man serving a 20-year sentence, “but we definitely do what we can.” Because he sleeps on the top bunk of his two-person cell, he gets the worst of the heat. He has hung blankets over the window to block the sun, insulated a jug of ice with towels so that there’s always cold water around and filled a Tupperware bowl with water and rags so that he can bathe himself.

Juan calls a floor fan draped with a damp towel a “homemade swamp cooler”. (When the fan is running, his cell, somewhat surprisingly, feels more tolerable.) In really warm weather, he strips down to his boxers and stands in the fan’s breeze while patting his body with a damp rag. This is quite a sight, given that he is over six-foot tall (1.8 metres) and nearly 300 pounds (135kg).

Such preparations have become necessary as our lives have got hotter. Last year, the prison was caught in the middle of what meteorologists call a heat dome – a high-altitude cauldron of stifling air, which caused temperatures of over 110℉ degrees for days. “After the first couple days, more than a few of us were breaking out in heat rashes and headaches,” remembers one prison resident. This summer was similarly dreadful. Heatwaves were once rare in the Pacific Northwest; now they are a regular occurrence.

The effects of extreme weather on prisoners rarely attracts attention. Yet as summer temperatures soar higher and for longer, more prisoners are feeling the heat from climate change.

Some on the outside may not care whether climate change makes prisons less comfortable, and perhaps that’s fair. As the guards around here regularly say, “If you don’t like the conditions, don’t come to prison.” But a prisoner’s experience of incarceration affects their ability to reintegrate into society: some studies show that more compassionate prison systems decrease rates of recidivism and increase public safety.

Even on a good day, it takes an immense effort to deal with the harsh conditions, horrible food and punitive measures found in American prisons. These problems are exacerbated, in many cases, by untreated mental-health and substance-abuse problems. Oppressive heat only adds to prisoners’ frustration. Steve, an inmate who is affectionately known as the unit’s workout junkie, says, “We all find our own ways of keeping up with our mental health in here. My way is to exercise.” When it gets too hot and prison staff close down the yard and gym, “minutes feel more like hours”.

Here at the Washington Corrections Centre, cool air can be as hard to find as a pardon

Violence is endemic in prisons, but extreme temperatures can cause tempers to flare more frequently. In our prison unit, 60 people share three showers, three toilets and a handful of tables scattered across a dayroom. We’re able to maintain harmony most of the time, as many prisoners spend hours away from the unit at work, in a recreation space or in some sort of programme. But on hot days these activities are often cancelled, leaving everyone crammed inside. The noise and chaos that ensues in this already intense environment can feel like being strapped to a chair while ants envelop your body.

On such days, we have to be careful. “I feel like I have to use all my skills to keep from going to the hole,” says Juan, referring to solitary confinement. “For me, on days like this it’s just best to stay in my cell.” His concern is well-founded: last summer, two guys got into a fight after a jug of ice – a precious resource in the summer – was tipped over.

Twice a day, we’re offered a slight reprieve as we walk to the chow hall for lunch and dinner. Prisoners are required to wear trousers around the facility, but when it’s over 90°F the rules are relaxed and you see people in gym shorts.

On our way to the hall, a mist machine hooked up to a garden hose blows water across the path, and for about ten seconds we pass through an oasis. A cluster of guards stands in the patch of green grass created by the man-made drizzle, reminding anyone who pauses to keep moving. One prisoner looks at the puddle created by the constant use of the mist machine and comments on how much water is being wasted. “Good”, a lifer named Tim replies, “I want this place to waste as much water as possible.”

The tough circumstances make some prisoners more environmentally conscious. Others, like Tim, take delight in contributing to the enormous quantity of waste that prisons produce – they reckon that if it becomes more expensive to incarcerate people, the government will want to do it less often. (Despite the popularity of this theory, the size of the prison population suggests their efforts have little impact on the government’s thinking; America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and one in seven prisoners are serving a life sentence.)

He strips down to his boxers and stands in the fan’s breeze while patting his body with a damp rag

Some saboteurs are simply angry about the length of their sentence or the conditions of their confinement, and want to create as much havoc as possible. As one particularly vocal wrecker says, “This place takes a pound of flesh from me every day and I ain’t giving it up cheap.” He balances the ledger by discarding several rolls of toilet paper each day, throwing plastic food trays in the bin and breaking things.

The truth is that all of us prisoners are perpetually churning out waste, whether we want to or not. Our three meals a day are shrouded in needless, single-use packaging. Breakfast comes in a plastic bag, lunch and dinner in Styrofoam containers – two clamshells per meal, one for the hot items and one for the cold.

Then there’s the contents of the meal. “You know”, says Juan one day, looking at food that the menu describes as meatloaf but that we call “brake pads”, “if the food wasn’t so bad a lot less of it would end up getting tossed in the trash.”

The average American wastes slightly less than a pound of food (450g) each day; the Washington Corrections Centre, which has a capacity of nearly 1,300 people, generates far more. Prisons also waste an obscene amount of water. Laundry services are constantly running, yet perhaps the greatest waste comes from an unexpected source – what’s known in prison patois as a “courtesy flush”.

When sharing communal bathroom facilities – with only thin plastic partitions separating the toilets from one another and from the dayroom – common decency dictates regular flushing. This means a trip to the toilet might require up to ten flushes (depending on how long you’re in there) to keep you in people’s good graces. Fail to do that and things can get ugly. Maybe the only thing more humiliating than having to use the toilet inches away from your neighbour is having a room full of prisoners screaming at you to “put some water on it”.

Despite prevailing attitudes, we are trying to instil environmentalism in the prison. Our morning trips to the worm bins and chicken yard are part of the Sustainability in Prisons Project run by Evergreen State College, which introduces inmates to vermiculture (breeding worms to compost food scraps), gardening and the process of “greening” spaces. The programme aims to mitigate the environmental degradation caused by prisons and even those of surrounding communities, to which the project has provided both compost and composting grubs.

This type of approach is unlikely to be adopted en masse. Many members of staff don’t like to see prisoners involved in any kind of constructive work, as they view prison as a place of punishment. And many prisoners don’t want to participate in activities that might make incarceration cheaper for the government.

Last summer, two guys got into a fight after a jug of ice – a precious resource in the summer – was tipped over

Changing such attitudes takes time. For nearly a decade, we’ve helped teach classes about sustainability to our peers. C-Low, a former gang member who came to prison as a teenager with a sentence of more than 40 years, would often give us a hard time about our efforts. He tells us, “For me it didn’t really click why I should care about the environment, especially with the kind of time I got.” Now, he has an interest in community gardens and hopes to create one upon his release. Ultimately, prisoners are survivors: show them how issues like climate change affect them personally, and their behaviour starts to change.

In the short-term, though, how are we supposed to stay cool? Rather than retrofit prisons, the state would prefer to build new facilities with modern climate-control measures. Many of us oppose this idea, fearing that these buildings will also be designed to house many more prisoners in far more restrictive settings.

So we’re stuck wishing we had relief from the heat, but knowing that relief comes at a high cost to ourselves, our fellow prisoners and the planet. We may look silly standing in our boxers, dabbing our bodies with wet rags, but, as Juan says, “Yeah, I’d like to see an A/C unit in every cell. But I’d also like my son to have a liveable planet to raise his kids in some day.” ■

Nick Hacheney and Tomas Keen are incarcerated at the Washington Corrections Centre in Washington state. Their writing has been published in the Crime Report, the Appeal, Open Campus and Filter. You can read their previous dispatch for 1843 magazine here

ILLUSTRATIONS:Michael Glenwood