TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — It was the hottest September in more than a century in parts of South Florida, and Dwayne Wilson could hear his 81-year-old fellow inmate gasping for air and screaming for aid at Dade Correctional Institution, 45 miles southwest Miami on the edge of the Florida Everglades.
The elderly man was confined to a wheelchair and had complained for weeks of severe chest pain and difficulty breathing in the unventilated dormitory where he was serving his sentence, according to a federal class-action lawsuit filed this week on behalf of Wilson and two other inmates at the prison .
Early on the morning of Sept. 24, the wheelchair-bound inmate, identified in the lawsuit as JB, was again heard begging for aid, the lawsuit says. A prisoner wheeled him into the infirmary, where medical staff ordered him to return to his cell within 15 minutes, according to court documents.
Soon after, JB was found unresponsive and his mouth was hanging open, the lawsuit says.
Lawyers said that on the day the 81-year-old died, the exhaust fans in his dorm were not working and the heat index rose to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). Life in the prison’s unair-conditioned cells can feel like being “locked in a sardine can with no air to breathe,” said an inmate named as GM in the lawsuit, and the heat has taken its toll.
The lawsuit, filed this week by prison reform advocacy group Florida Justice Institute, says the heat at the facility contributed to the deaths of four people there and that prison officials failed to take “meaningful measures” to reduce the risk elderly people to reduce disabled prisoners in their care.
The lawsuit, which names the Florida Department of Corrections, the department’s secretary and the DCI director as defendants, argues that the conditions violate the Eighth Amendment’s protections barring cruel and unusual punishment, as well as Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act.
“We had to file this lawsuit because they have so far ignored the concerns of the detainees and their lawyers. And so it appears that they need a court to order them to do what they themselves should have done,” said Andrew Udelsman, an attorney with the Florida Justice Institute.
A Department of Corrections spokesman said the department does not comment on pending litigation and said the agency had no record of being served with the lawsuit.
According to the World Health Organization, extreme heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths. While deadly heat is nothing novel, scientists say it has increased in magnitude, frequency and duration due to climate change. Last year, the United States recorded the most heat-related deaths in more than 80 years, according to an Associated Press analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Still, the majority of incarcerated people in moist Florida are serving their sentences in cells without air conditioning, even as soaring temperatures in the state continue to break records. The risk is even greater for older adults and those with medical conditions that make them more vulnerable to heat-related illnesses.
According to a statement presented to state lawmakers last year by Corrections Secretary Ricky Dixon, 75% of the state’s prison housing facilities are not air-conditioned. Bills filed last year that would have required the department to install air conditioning in state prisons failed in the Republican-controlled Legislature.
“When you are in the facility and visit a dormitory without air conditioning, you see the guards who are responsible for maintaining security in those rooms. This is absolutely depressing,” Republican Senator Jennifer Bradley said at a hearing last October.
“There are things we can do in our system to mitigate the heat. “Or Florida will be the victim of a lawsuit,” she warned. “And it’s going to be a lot more expensive.”
Florida isn’t alone in facing lawsuits over dangerously balmy prisons. Lawsuits have also been filed in Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico. A report filed in Georgia in July claimed a 27-year-old inmate died after being left for hours in an outside cell without water, shade or ice.
Udelsman said he hopes the Florida lawsuit will aid force courts to set consistent safety standards for incarcerated people at risk of deadly heat exposure at a time when climate change is a threat to the the country’s increasingly aging and invalided prison population.
“Courts are increasingly confirming that such conditions are unconstitutional,” Udelsman said. “We hope that this lawsuit will be another one in that vein…that these dominoes continue to fall.”
___ Kate Payne is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
