The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals brought some good news to the effort to get inmates in Texas’ prison system living in less-than-extreme conditions on Friday, Aug. 18, when it affirmed a decision made by a Houston federal judge earlier this month ruling that – among other things – the Department of Crim­inal Justice needs to find a way to lower the temperature inside the Wallace Pack Unit in Navasota for “heat-sensitive inmates” – a preliminary injunction that’s resulted in TDCJ’s recent dispersal of those inmates to other prisons across the state. (Tempera­tures at Pack, as elsewhere in Texas penitentiaries, regularly exceed 100 degrees. Since 1998, at least 22 inmates have died of heat-related causes in state prisons.) Friday’s affirmation will allow the group of six original plaintiffs to expand to include Pack’s entire population, over 1,400 inmates.

This article appears in August 25 • 2017.

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