For decades, thousands of people incarcerated in Texas prisons have spent summers living in buildings without universal air conditioning, even as temperatures climbed into dangerous territory. Now, after years of litigation, scientific research, deaths, and repeated fights over funding, Texas prisons are under a federal court order to change.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ordered the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in September 2026 to install air conditioning throughout its prison system by the end of 2029. The sweeping order puts a deadline on a problem Texas has debated for years: how long people can legally be housed inside prisons where summer heat can become dangerous.
The Texas prison air conditioning fight did not suddenly begin in 2026. What changed was the weight of the evidence and years of litigation culminating in a trial and permanent injunction.
In his ruling, Pitman described testimony from formerly incarcerated people who said prisoners became sick and passed out in facilities without air conditioning. Some became so desperate for relief that splashing toilet water on themselves was described as “common.”
“These are not humane conditions,” Pitman wrote.
The ruling found that subjecting prisoners to the extreme heat at issue violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
The order carries a significant price tag. TDCJ has estimated that cooling the entire prison system could cost roughly $1.5 billion. Texas currently incarcerates about 143,000 people, and nearly two-thirds of its 104 prisons were not fully air-conditioned as the litigation approached its conclusion.
So why did it take this long?
Money has consistently been one of the biggest arguments.
Texas prison officials have maintained that cooling old facilities is a massive infrastructure project requiring legislative funding, construction and electrical upgrades. Officials have also cited the rural locations and age of many prisons, construction complications and equipment availability.
Former TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier previously said he wanted every facility cooled but lacked the money to accomplish it. His successor, Bobby Lumpkin, defended the agency’s budget approach during the 2026 trial, saying, “We have to be good fiscal stewards.”
Yet the funding debate became increasingly difficult to separate from Texas’ spending decisions.
Bills seeking temperature limits in state prisons repeatedly failed in the Legislature. A 2023 proposal, for example, would have required TDCJ facilities to remain between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Texas already requires county jails to maintain temperatures within that range, but state prisons have not historically been governed by the same statewide requirement.
In 2023, lawmakers entered the legislative session with a historic budget surplus but did not initially dedicate direct funding to universally air-condition prisons. Funding for cooling projects later increased. TDCJ says lawmakers provided $85 million in 2023 and another $118 million in the following legislative session to help create approximately 29,000 cooled beds. The agency also received more than $400 million in 2025 for air-conditioned expansion dorms and the purchase of an already climate-controlled facility.
Still, that left large portions of the prison population without cooled housing.
The human cost is also complicated because there are two very different numbers associated with deaths.
According to the 2026 federal ruling, TDCJ acknowledged 23 heat-related deaths between 1998 and 2012 and three additional heat-related deaths in 2023. Pitman also said plaintiffs presented “credible evidence” of additional deaths between 2023 and 2025 that were caused at least partly by heat.
Scientific research suggests the actual impact could be much larger than deaths officially classified as heat-related.
A peer-reviewed 2022 study published in JAMA Network Open examined deaths in Texas prisons between 2001 and 2019. Researchers estimated that approximately 271 deaths in prisons without air conditioning during warm months may have been attributable to extreme heat, averaging roughly 14 deaths per year.
Researchers found that an extreme heat day was associated with a 15.1 percent increase in mortality risk at prisons without air conditioning. They did not find the same increased mortality pattern in air-conditioned facilities.
The distinction matters. The 271 figure is a statistical estimate of deaths attributable to extreme heat, not an official TDCJ count of death certificates specifically listing heat as the cause.
Warnings had been building long before that study.
In litigation involving the Wallace Pack Unit, a federal court found years ago that extreme heat posed a serious risk to prisoners, particularly older people and those with medical conditions. A 2018 settlement ultimately required air conditioning in housing areas covered by that case and called for heat indices to remain at or below 88 degrees during warmer months.
Meanwhile, TDCJ developed mitigation policies for prisons still lacking universal air conditioning. Current protocols include chilled water, cold showers, fans, air-conditioned respite areas, and priority placement in cooled housing for prisoners identified as medically heat-sensitive.
The agency argues those measures matter and says its number of air-conditioned beds has grown dramatically, from about 35,000 in 2018 to an expected 60,000 by the end of 2026. TDCJ expects that figure to reach 90,000 in 2028.
But the 2026 court order changes the equation because expansion is no longer simply an agency goal. It comes with a federal deadline.
TDCJ says it will appeal the decision and maintains that it has “robust heat mitigation efforts in place.”
For prisoners and advocacy groups that spent years challenging the conditions, the ruling marks a major shift after decades of incremental change.
Amite Dominick, founder and president of Texas Prisons Community Advocates, said the decision “made clear that the state cannot keep treating human lives as a budget line.”
“We will be watching every deadline in this order,” Dominick said.
The history behind the ruling makes clear that Texas’ prison air conditioning fight was never simply about comfort. It became a fight over constitutional limits, public spending, and what happens when dangerous heat collides with a prison system where the people inside cannot leave it.
