Texas inmates claim they are being "cooked to death" while being held in "third world" conditions and often have to resort to flooding their cells with toilet water to survive sweltering prisons where the temperatures can soar to triple-digits in summer, according to a report.
Bernhardt Tiede, 65, who has diabetes and hypertension, said he had an "acute medical crisis" when he was being housed in a cell last summer where temperatures reached 112 degrees, Law & Crime reported Wednesday.
Tiede, in prison for the murder of an 81-year-old woman in 1996, was eventually moved to an air-conditioned unit.
A number of prison advocacy groups have joined Tiede's federal lawsuit against Bryan Collier, the executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
"Texas prisoners are being cooked to death. Last summer alone, many people died and hundreds more suffered serious heat-related illnesses because of the sweltering temperatures in Texas's prisons," the suit says.
Tiede's suit says that there have been 271 deaths in Texas prisons between 2001 and 2019 attributed to "extreme heat exposure."
"We're not trying to make this lush, we're trying to make it humane," said Lancy Lowry, former head of the Correctional Officers Union, court documents said. "These are third world conditions. We're supposed to run prisons, not concentration camps. These are institutions for incarceration. The incarceration is their punishment. Not cooking them to death."
The stifling conditions in Texas prisons have been cited as "cruel and unusual punishment" by the Justice Department, the U.S. Congress, the Texas legislature, as well as doctors and the courts, the lawsuit says.
A Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson told Law & Crime that the agency won't comment on pending litigation.
But the person said the prison system is making headway in constructing new air conditioning after receiving $85 million in funding. There are 45,498 cool beds now available, with another 13,714 either under construction or in the design phase.
