The purpose of the juvenile justice system in Louisiana is not to punish but to rehabilitate. But dozens of young Louisianans were transferred nearly a year ago to the vacant former death row of the notorious adult maximum security state penitentiary known as Angola, where they have suffered through a summer of record-breaking heat — without air conditioning, according to plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state. As temperatures outside reached triple digits for days, conditions inside the windowless cells became unbearable.
This is not rehabilitation, and it’s not even punishment. It is torture.
Adults are in prison for punishment as well as rehabilitation, but shouldn’t have to endure such conditions any more than teenagers should.
Yet intense heat has so affected imprisoned Louisiana adults that officials have had to step up suicide watches. At the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation found indoor temperatures reaching 145 degrees last year. In Texas, where 70% of prison living quarters reportedly lack air conditioning, incarceration becomes execution, as climate change drives already blistering summer temperatures even higher.
… To our shame, it has long been part of American culture to accept or even delight in torturous prison conditions. In Maricopa County, Ariz., former Sheriff Joe Arpaio was treated as a folk hero for keeping jail inmates in tents in the desert amid daily summer temperatures of 120 degrees.
But cruelty is explicitly unconstitutional and not part of acceptable prison treatment, no matter what the individuals did to be sent there.
… Prisons cannot operate on the cheap, and climate change is making them even costlier. We will pay, one way or the other — either by making them slightly more humane or by paying wrongful-death verdicts and settlements for accepting the cruel torture of our fellow human beings.
— Los Angeles Times
