This story was originally published by The 19th.
These Texas advocates call themselves “lionesses” for a reason: They say backing down is not in their nature.
In 2022, a small group of formerly incarcerated women formed the nonprofit Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance to empower communities to challenge harmful practices within the criminal legal system. Since that time, they have put a spotlight on what they argue are dangerous conditions caused by extreme heat and cold in Texas prisons.
This week, Lioness, alongside two other organizations, won a major lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) after a federal judge ruled that the state must air-condition all Texas prisons by the end of 2029. This change would fall in line with rules that already require Texas county jails to maintain temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees.
In a 150-page order, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman noted that roughly 88,697 incarcerated people were housed in unairconditioned units heading into summer 2026, meaning TDCJ provides “cool beds” for only about 37 percent of its population.
“It has been said that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its Prisons,” Pitman wrote. “As described below, the record in this case paints a clear picture: in a state where outdoor heat indexes exceed 130 degrees, inmates in Texas prisons are suffering — and in some cases dying — in extreme heat every summer.”
This, he argued, violates the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. For the Lioness staff who spoke with The 19th, the judge’s order was a long time coming.
“We’ve been laughing and crying and celebrating, and also, you know, preparing because we know that this is just one step in the fight,” said Marci Marie Simmons, director of communications for Lioness. Simmons spent a decade incarcerated in a Texas prison and is intimately familiar with summers inside prison walls made of concrete and steel.
“I remember laying in my bunk — we weren’t allowed to lay on the floor in that prison — and I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know if I will survive this,’” Simmons said.
Lioness operates with a core team of one full-time executive director and four part-time employees, including Simmons, and they are all formerly incarcerated. The organization has grown into a network of about 500 members, including 400 who are currently incarcerated. They work to advance the health, safety and well-being of the estimated nearly 20,000 women and transgender people inside Texas prisons and jails, in addition to those navigating life outside.
Fighting to bring radical change to any state institution can be difficult, at best, and at times can feel insurmountable. But everything is bigger in Texas, including its prison system, which has more incarcerated people than many individual countries. That did not deter this group, Simmons said.
“Our organization is named Lioness, and there’s a reason for that. We move like the animal. Lionesses stick together; they stay together,” she said. “It’s that same tenacity and loyalty that a lioness has — that’s what we have that makes us capable of taking on, frankly, the largest prison system in the country.”
For years, letters had poured into Lioness’ mailbox, with incarcerated people sharing details of how the heat affected them. Sometimes, they “just wrote because they were hot, frustrated, sad and exhausted, and they felt forgotten,” Diane Thompson, Lioness’ director of member relations, wrote in an email to The 19th. “They needed somebody on the outside to hear them and to know what they were living through.”
Those stories were at the forefront of the Lioness staff’s minds as they entered the legal fight for air conditioning. In 2024, Lioness joined and expanded on an existing federal lawsuit filed a year prior on behalf of Bernie Tiede, a 65-year-old man with diabetes and high blood pressure whose health, he argued, had been affected by the heat. The Lioness lawsuit was filed jointly with two other organizations, Texas Prisons Community Advocates and Texas Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants.
Thompson kept meticulous notes on the heat-related letters. She logged the correspondence in a spreadsheet, listing the incarcerated members’ names and unit, the date they sent the letter, the heat-related issue they reported and any other notable details they might have included. She also saved the physical copies of the letters in a folder for future reference, Thompson said.
Judge Pitman referenced these letters at multiple points in his order.
“We are a membership-based organization. We include our incarcerated members in our decision-making. They lead our advocacy work,” Simmons said. “Because of the structure of our organization, that is what got us to the finish line in this case.”
Carlee Purdum, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Houston, who has researched how natural disasters impact incarcerated people, said she was overwhelmed to hear the news of the victory. “The immense pressure it’s going to relieve off of people’s health and on the entire system. I just can feel that,” she said.
She has studied the physical and mental toll extreme heat has taken on people in Texas prisons. “The most significant impact is just the helplessness and the dehumanization that a person feels,” she said. “It’s not being able to protect yourself and not being able to protect the people around you that you care about, and feeling like nobody else cares.”
In surveys Purdum has conducted, incarcerated people have described myriad health effects from the heat, including heat illness, passing out, and having seizures and rashes.
Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), a nonprofit that researches prison conditions, said many people in prison also have physical conditions that make them more susceptible to extreme heat.
“Quite a few of them are taking psychotropic medications, which often are dangerous to be taking if you’re exposed to the heat for a long time. And the same goes for people with high blood pressure who are on hypertension medication,” Bertram said. A big portion of the population has diabetes and heart issues that make people more vulnerable to heat, she said.
A majority of incarcerated women who are in prison or jail have a chronic medical condition. Women are also more likely to report “serious psychological distress,” compared to men, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).
Purdum also conducted focus groups that included women from Lioness, who brought up having to deal with pregnancy and menopause in the extreme heat. U.S. prisons and jails see about 58,000 admissions of pregnant women each year, and studies have shown that extreme heat is linked to higher rates of preeclampsia, a potentially fatal blood pressure condition, and is associated with higher rates of premature and low-weight births.
The population of older incarcerated women is also growing, and experiencing perimenopause and menopause symptoms that include hot flashes and night sweats. The percentage of women over the age of 50 held in state and federal prisons grew from 8 percent in 2008 to 18 percent in 2023, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
While this judge’s ruling could lead to change in Texas, at least 13 states do not require universal air conditioning in their prisons, and many of those are located in the South, according to a 2019 report by PPI In 2019.
“A lot of places in the country have extreme heat, even more so now with global warming,” Bertram said. “There aren’t really states in the country where this isn’t an issue.”
Without air conditioning in a majority of Texas’s prisons, Purdum said the options given to people to cool off are limited. If they run out of water, they have to request more from prison officials, and they need permission to access cooled respite areas.
“People in the free world just do not understand what it means to not be able to take the simplest actions to stay comfortable, to stay alive,” she said.
This will likely still be the case for the next few years. Texas has until December 31, 2029, to install air conditioning and is required to submit status reports to the court every six months; the state plans to appeal the court’s decision.
In the meantime, Purdum has seen how the women have taken care of each other. In her focus groups, they described redirecting their own resources to make others more comfortable during extreme heat days.
“They talked about women who were elderly, and women who had health issues that made them more vulnerable to the heat, and talking about, ‘Okay, ‘well, how are we going to make sure that we’re checking on those people?’ And they talked about going and making sure they had water,” she said.
“They were just these kinds of extraordinary examples of care,” she added. “We have a lot to learn from them.”
She credits that kinship and concern for those still incarcerated for the recent victory.
“It was always about the people that they still had on the inside, and they never stopped fighting for them. That was extraordinary to just witness,” she said. “I’m just very proud to have had the opportunity to work with them.”
Written by Candice Norwood
Featured Image: Robert Stringer/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
