At least 41 people have died in the Lone Star State’s unairconditioned prisons due to heat-related or unknown conditions this summer, according to the Texas Tribune.
Even so, it’s hard to firmly establish how many have succumbed to heat-related illness, according to observers. That’s because TDCJ’s official stance is that no inmates have died of heat exhaustion since 2012 — the same year the agency began to be bombarded with wrongful death lawsuits from inmates’ families, the Tribune reports.
It may be prison, but those inmates are still human.
Even death row inmates get to die in less cruel ways than being effectively boiled alive.
Their punishment was their isolation from society and its luxuries, any further suffering purposefully/neglectfully introduced by the prison is cruel and unnecessary.