The trial is over. The summer is not. In a downtown Austin federal courthouse, a two-week proceeding that could force the State of Texas to cool its entire prison system closed on the evening of April 9, 2026, and then everyone went home to wait. The judge will rule in his own time. The thermometers will not.
At stake is whether roughly one hundred thirty thousand to one hundred forty thousand people held in Texas state lockups have a constitutional right not to be cooked. The plaintiffs — a coalition of advocacy organizations joined by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Texans — want United States District Judge Robert Pitman to order air conditioning installed in every inmate housing area in every state-run prison before the end of 2029, with enforceable milestones along the way. The defendant, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, does not really argue that the heat is safe. It argues that fixing it is expensive and slow.
That is the whole shape of the case, and it is worth sitting with for a moment. The agency that runs the prisons is not standing in court claiming the conditions are humane. Its own leadership has conceded, under oath, that air conditioning is the only thing that reliably keeps people from dying in the heat. The fight is not about whether the danger is real. It is about money, pace, and a body count the state would prefer no one counted.
This is not the first time a federal judge has looked at Texas prisons in summer and recoiled. More than a year before this trial began, in a ninety-one-page ruling issued in March 2025, Judge Pitman found that housing inmates in sweltering facilities without air conditioning is, in his words, "plainly unconstitutional." He stopped short of ordering an immediate fix. Instead he pushed the case toward the trial that has now concluded, and he warned the Department that he foresaw the plaintiffs being entitled to permanent relief — meaning the expeditious installation of air conditioning across all facilities.
So the constitutional question was, in a real sense, answered before the trial started. What the courtroom in Austin was actually litigating was the remedy: how fast, how completely, and whether the state can be trusted to do it without a court standing over its shoulder. Pitman is hearing the case from the bench, without a jury. A decision could take months, and whichever way it lands, it is likely to be appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Here is where the omission lives. Ask the Texas Department of Criminal Justice how many people have died from the heat in its prisons since 2012, and the official answer is none. Zero. Ask researchers who have studied the same prisons, and the answer is dozens every summer.
A 2022 study published in JAMA Network Open, conducted by researchers affiliated with Brown University and Harvard University among other institutions, examined deaths in Texas prisons during warm months between 2001 and 2019. It concluded that roughly thirteen percent of those deaths — an estimated two hundred seventy-one people — were likely attributable to extreme heat. That figure is a statistical estimate, not a list of individually adjudicated cases, and it should always be described that way. But it is precisely the kind of number that disappears when an agency simply declines to write "heat" on a death certificate.
The plaintiffs sharpened the point at trial. They began by alleging at least five heat-related deaths over the previous two summers. By closing arguments, attorney Kevin Homiak was pointing to ten deaths since 2023 that he argued were heat-related — including one man who died last August with a body temperature of one hundred five degrees. More damning, Homiak accused the Department of slow-walking autopsy reports and falsifying temperature logs to keep the scope of the problem from state lawmakers. He called it deliberate indifference. The phrase is not rhetorical flourish; in Eighth Amendment law, deliberate indifference is the legal standard that turns a bad condition into a constitutional violation.
The state's response has been narrow and revealing. It does not deny that the deaths happened. It denies that heat caused them, attributing them instead to underlying medical conditions. A spokesperson has acknowledged twenty-three heat-related deaths between 1998 and 2012, one death in fiscal year 2024 deemed "most likely heat related," and three deaths in fiscal year 2023 where elevated temperatures were listed in autopsies as a possible contributing factor. Notice the architecture of that language: "possible contributing factor," "most likely." Each qualifier is a door through which a death can exit the official count.
The most quoted number in this story needs to be handled with care, because it is the one an opponent will reach for first. The figure of one hundred forty-nine degrees is real, but it is a heat index — the combined effect of temperature and humidity on the human body — not a raw air-temperature reading. It surfaced in a 2011 temperature log from the Hutchins Unit near Dallas, where the heat index was recorded as topping one hundred forty-nine degrees by half past ten in the morning, and it was reinforced by a 2022 report from Texas A&M University's Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, which found that interior conditions in some units regularly reach one hundred ten degrees and that at least one unit had topped one hundred forty-nine.
Once you adjust for that, the picture does not soften. It hardens. A comprehensive analysis of four years of heat data found that Texas prisons without air conditioning routinely run hot enough that, if they were any other kind of building, they would be breaking the law. During the 2023 heat wave, one unit near Corpus Christi hit ninety-five degrees indoors on more than a hundred days and crossed into triple digits roughly a quarter of the year.
Texas requires its county jails to stay between sixty-five and eighty-five degrees. It has since 1994. Its animal shelters have heat rules. Its state prisons have neither.
That is the comparison that ought to anchor any honest account of this case. Nearly every Texan has air conditioning at home or at work. County jails — where people are held before they have been convicted of anything — are temperature-regulated by law. Federal prisons are climate-controlled. Even the kennels are covered. The single category of building in Texas where it is legal to hold a human being in a one-hundred-ten-degree room is a state prison.
The state's central defense is the bill. During the trial, the Department's executive director confirmed that the estimated cost of fully air-conditioning every Texas prison has climbed to roughly one and a half billion dollars, up from earlier estimates closer to one and one-tenth billion, with annual operating costs near twenty million. "We have to be good fiscal stewards," he told the court.
Set that against the ledger. In 2023, the Texas Legislature directed no money at all specifically toward air-conditioning prisons — in a year when the state was sitting on a budget surplus of thirty-two and seven-tenths billion dollars. In 2025, lawmakers appropriated one hundred eighteen million for installation, enough by the Department's own account to add roughly eighteen thousand cool beds. As of late March 2026, the agency reported about fifty-two thousand cool beds available and projected reaching around seventy thousand by the end of summer 2027. With a population well above one hundred thirty thousand, the arithmetic does not close. The pace, the plaintiffs argue, is not a constraint. It is a choice.
The plaintiffs' attorneys put it plainly. The Department, they say, chose the slowest and least efficient process available, one that stretches the timeline by years. "They don't see this as an emergency," Homiak argued. "They never have."
There is precedent buried in this case that explains why the plaintiffs are confident. In 2018, after a separate years-long federal lawsuit, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice installed air conditioning at the Wallace Pack Unit, a geriatric prison near College Station. The state did it — but only when a court made it. The plaintiffs are essentially holding that history up and asking the judge to do system-wide what was once done one prison at a time.
And Texas is not alone in the dock of public attention. It is one of more than a dozen states without universal air conditioning in its prisons. Similar heat lawsuits have been filed in Louisiana and Georgia. Plaintiffs' counsel has openly described this litigation as a potential model, pointing to un-air-conditioned units in Louisiana and Mississippi that grow just as dangerous. A ruling that Texas must cool its prisons would not stay inside Texas. It would travel.
Strip the case to its frame and a strange symmetry appears. The agency running the prisons agrees the heat is deadly. A federal judge has already called the conditions plainly unconstitutional. Researchers estimate dozens die each summer. And yet the state's official record shows zero heat deaths in well over a decade, the legislature let a thirty-two-billion-dollar surplus pass without cooling a single cell, and the remedy now hinges on whether a court will force a hand that has admitted, under oath, what the right thing to do is.
The deaths are not in dispute. The temperatures are not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether any of it will be written down as what it is. That is the quiet machinery of this story — not a lie exactly, but a refusal to record. A death with heat as a "possible contributing factor" is a death the state never has to answer for. A temperature log that goes missing is a heat wave that, officially, never happened.
Judge Pitman will issue his ruling in the weeks ahead, with another Texas summer already pressing against the cell walls. Whatever he decides, the number that should haunt this case is the one the state keeps reporting: zero. It is the cleanest number in the entire record, and the least believable.