In California's Prisons, High Heat And Increasingly Extreme Weather Are Growing Concerns

As Southern California continues to broil under yet another heatwave, researchers have been looking at how extreme heat affects vulnerable populations, including people incarcerated in California prisons.

Hidden Hazards, a recent report from the Ella Baker Center and UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, surveyed hundreds of incarcerated people throughout California to see how extreme heat was affecting them. To learn more, LAist spoke with the report's co-author Abhilasha Bhola.

The conversation in July with LAist 89.3's Julia Paskin has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What prisons are like in the heat

LAist: What does it look like in a California prison when the heat gets upwards of 110 degrees?

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Abhilasha Bhola: So in our report, we surveyed almost 600 incarcerated people across the state of California and a huge majority of them, about 66% of them, all said that extreme heat was one of the main climate hazards that they actually experienced.

Oftentimes, prisons in California don't have air conditioning, they don't have ventilation, and they don't have adequate shade structures. And I know this sounds serious, but we have to consider the particularities of incarcerated people. A lot of them are on medications, or they're older, which makes them even more vulnerable to extreme heat, heat exhaustion and heat stroke than even we would be.

Why climate change overall is a concern

LAist: What about other threats from climate change? We do expect a lot more wildfires and floods in the state.

AB: Yeah, so as we saw in our mapping, there's going to be an increase in temperature as climate change accelerates across the state. And in addition to that, a lot of incarcerated individuals have experienced wildfires close to their facilities, as well as significant flood risk.

So in our report, we actually found 18 state prisons that were particularly vulnerable to extreme temperatures, wildfires, and floods.

LAist: Are there particular facilities of concern that you'd like to flag, especially in Southern California?

AB: In Southern California, we need to look at California State Prison here in Los Angeles County, Chuckawalla State Prison, Ironwood State Prison, Richard J. Donovan [Correctional Facility]. And what we really need to think about are the prisons that are in desert areas, close to the Arizona and Nevada borders, as well as prisons that are very far south in California, close to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Those are the prisons that are going to be facing some of the worst effects of extreme heat in our region. But I want to point out that climate change is really accelerating, so just because these are the prisons that are experiencing some of the worst harms doesn't mean that folks in other prisons in traditionally cooler regions may not also be facing these harms because of lack of ventilation, air conditioning and inadequate infrastructure.

Safety during extreme weather events

LAist: What options do incarcerated people have, if any, if they feel like they're not safe during extreme weather events?

AB: Oftentimes, they are at the mercy of the administration of their facilities. California does require that there is an extreme heat plan in facilities where people have increased access to shade, ventilation, and more showers.

But in our survey, we found that [for] a lot of folks, even though they are told that they are able to access these things, [they] don't actually get access. So there isn't much that they can do because oftentimes if there's a disaster, we had folks reporting that they felt like they would just be locked in their cell and there was nothing that they could do.

Recommendations for what's next

LAist: What else would you recommend state corrections start to do to better prepare for extreme weather?

AB: There are a few things. The first is that as we see extreme weather events, and we know which prisons are most vulnerable, we need to really focus on decarceration strategies and making sure that people can get out of prison so they can have agency over themselves, their lives, and [can] take care of themselves.

In addition, we would like to see that as we close state prisons, that money that's saved from closing state prisons is reinvested in the facilities that still exist. [We also want] to make sure that there's better infrastructure and access to air conditioning. [And we want to see funds] reinvested in the communities that incarcerated people come from, which are oftentimes the same communities that face disproportionate harms of climate change, because they don't have the infrastructure to deal with extreme weather events. Or they don't have adequate shade or trees in their neighborhood. So it's really a strategy of reinvestment that is both in the prisons that still exist and also in folks' home communities.