Could air conditioning help prevent extreme violence in prisons? Research suggests so : NPR

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

To maintain our cool this summer season, most of us are most likely selecting to spend extra time in air conditioned areas. However many individuals in prisons do not have that possibility. The U.S. Division of Justice is investigating prisons in some southern states, making an attempt to get to the foundation of persistent violence. And as Grant Blankenship of Georgia Public Broadcasting explains, they could check out the warmth.

GRANT BLANKENSHIP, BYLINE: In a cellular phone video shared by a Georgia jail rights activist, a bunch of largely shirtless males are bent over a giant black cart.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I simply got here in right here. It ain’t been nothing however 30 seconds.

BLANKENSHIP: Because the digicam pulls again, you see it is an ice cooler parked on a jail block.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: It has been one minute. How a lot ice left?

BLANKENSHIP: Dana Smallwood Linton says, like these males, that is how her son is supposed to remain cool in his jail.

DANA SMALLWOOD LINTON: It is 90 levels inside. How lengthy do you assume that ice is lasting?

BLANKENSHIP: Solely 1 / 4 of Georgia’s prisons are absolutely air conditioned. The others are solely partially cooled, perhaps in a single dormitory. Linton’s son is at Phillips State Jail, certainly one of two within the Georgia system with no air-con in any respect. And whereas Linton says that is powerful sufficient for her 22-year-old son, his roommate is 80.

LINTON: You realize, he does not – he very not often leaves his room as a result of it is so exhausting for him to even stroll from his room to the bathe.

BLANKENSHIP: The direct risk to bodily well being from warmth is well-documented, however jail warmth presents one other hazard too – homicides. Phillips State Jail noticed its first deaths this 12 months in July, usually the most popular month of the 12 months in Georgia. Two of these three July deaths had been dominated homicides. That sample of homicides peaking on the most popular days repeats itself throughout the Georgia jail system not less than way back to 2015.

Anita Mukherjee is an assistant professor within the enterprise faculty on the College of Wisconsin. She says that Georgia sample mirrors what she present in a Mississippi examine.

ANITA MUKHERJEE: Yeah. So the query that we began out with is, what’s the impact of, as an instance, a scorching day versus a average temperature day on acts of violence in jail.

BLANKENSHIP: Mukherjee and her co-researcher, Nicholas Sanders of Cornell College, used some subtle math to isolate warmth from some 52 different variables in eight years of knowledge from the Mississippi Division of Corrections.

MUKHERJEE: What generates a response in violence is days averaging 80 levels or extra.

BLANKENSHIP: On a day like that, Mukherjee says it may simply prime 100 levels inside a jail when there is no air-con or locations to chill down. That drawback is concentrated at prisons in 13 states within the South and Southwest. Mukherjee and Sanders say when a day in jail is that scorching, count on about 20% extra acts of maximum violence than on a temperate day. Yearly, that is about 4,000 violent acts in prisons throughout the nation.

BURLING CAIN: Corrections means appropriate deviant conduct. It doesn’t suggest lock and feed, torture and torment.

BLANKENSHIP: In the course of the lengthy profession of Mississippi Division of Corrections Commissioner Burling Cain, federal courts have discovered that even simply the specter of sickness and violence from warmth is a civil rights violation.

CAIN: And so then, fairly quickly it violates the Eighth Modification, you possibly can say.

BLANKENSHIP: The Eighth Modification to the Structure protects in opposition to merciless and weird punishment. The federal Division of Justice has been in search of Eighth Modification violations in Southern prisons, together with these run by Cain, for years.

CAIN: Yeah, they’ve already stated it about it being scorching, scorching, scorching. We all know it is scorching.

BLANKENSHIP: And Cain says that is an issue for correctional officers, too.

CAIN: Nicely, you realize, some folks cannot stand that warmth anyway, they usually do not wish to work in it.

BLANKENSHIP: Prisons throughout the South battle to maintain even a minimally protected variety of correctional officers. Georgia’s staffing is down by practically 40%. 100-degree workplaces do not assist. So Cain is putting in air-con in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Jail.

CAIN: However the principle factor is the violence is down. So meaning it a safer place to work, in order that’s good.

BLANKENSHIP: His intention is to do the identical for the whole Mississippi jail system.

For NPR Information, I am Grant Blankenship in Macon, Ga.

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