Judge orders Texas to have air conditioning at all prisons by end of 2029 - AP News

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman issued the order in a 150-page ruling, giving TDCJ a hard deadline and requiring the agency to start building an installation plan right away. Advocates who have pushed for prison air conditioning for years across Texas called the decision a major win. Texas summers regularly push past 100 degrees, and West Texas prison units bake through months of triple digit heat with the same lack of climate control as facilities elsewhere in the state.

For families with loved ones locked up in Texas prisons, this ruling sets a real, dated commitment instead of another promise. TDCJ now has to move from talk to a formal plan that delivers cooled housing units before 2029 closes out. Staff working those units stand to benefit too. Officers and guards spend their shifts in the same un-cooled cellblocks as the people incarcerated there, so the fix reaches both sides of the bars.

The order does not specify how TDCJ will pay for statewide installation across its full prison system. What it does make clear is that heat itself can amount to punishment, and one of the largest prison systems in the country now has to answer for it on a deadline.