Enjoying a brisk Houston breeze, Melvin Halsey smiles outside his workplace. The comfortable weather is a reminder of the relentless heat he and others survived inside the Texas prison system.
Photo by Emmanuella Desruisseaux via Houston Newsroom
On a cool afternoon in Houston, Melvin Halsey sat on a concrete bench outside the hospital where he now works, hands folded in his lap as he talked through the years he spent in Texas prisons.
“I’ve been to several units,” he said, listing them off from memory, the Walls Unit, Gurney, Gaza East, Wayne Scott, and Clemens, which he and others called “burning hell.”
He said it casually, almost matter‑of‑fact, the way someone might describe a place they used to live.
“It really is inhumane, to be honest with you. You know, you ain’t supposed to be in no, in no kind of place where the temperature is over 98 degrees Fahrenheit,” he said.
Halsey has been incarcerated in multiple facilities across the state, including older red‑brick units that he said “feel like an oven.” He was also on psych medication during parts of his sentence, a combination that made the heat feel heavier and harder to manage.
“I’m on these psych meds,” he said.. “I’m trying to get better. Things are just not what they need to be right now. And so that takes a lot of you mentally and physically, because now you’re worrying, now you’re sweating. Now you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to keep yourself cool,” he said.
He described nights where men slept under one industrial fan, bodies packed together on the floor. Days where people soaked sheets in water and laid under them, hoping the dampness would buy a few minutes of relief.
“If you don’t have a fan, you’re out of there,” he said. “I’ve seen several people get sick from the heat.”
A Houston Story Behind the Courtroom
Those oven-like conditions are currently the focus of a high-stakes legal battle. A federal trial in Austin is underway to determine whether the lack of air-conditioning in Texas prisons violates the constitutional rights of incarcerated individuals. But as the state defends its practices in front of a judge, those who actually lived through the heat, like Halsey say the legal arguments fail to capture the daily reality.
Halsey’s experience is not unusual, especially for people from Houston, which sends more residents to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) than any other county in the state.
Many return home with heat‑related health issues, sleep problems, or anxiety around hot weather.
At a nearby public park, Anthony Lindsay described a similar reality. He had been incarcerated in more than a dozen units over the years: Segovia, Darrington, McConnell, Ellis, Holiday, Travis State Jail, and Holiday.
Born and raised in Houston, he said the city’s temperature is intense, but prison heat is something else entirely with a mix of the city’s humidity.
“It’s like you’re just drowning in your own fluids,” he said.
Both men said they avoided talking about the heat with their families. “I never really discussed the suffering or the uncomfortability or anything that I was going through dealing with the heat,” Lindsay said.
“You know, I knew I put myself in a bad situation by making mistakes. So, it’s not a part of the punishment because it’s like cruel and unusual punishment,”
Lindsay says even now, when he walks into his air-conditioned apartment or his comfortable workplace, he still thinks about what the men inside are going through when the middle of August hits.
Looking off across a Houston park, Anthony Lindsay remains thoughtful after talking about his time served in extreme heat. Even in comfortable and cool environments like the park his mind tends to drift back to the men trapped inside during the brutal August summers.
Photo by Emmanuella Desruisseaux via Houston Newsroom
Dr. Amite Dominick, founder of Texas Prisons Community Advocates, said that silence is something she hears constantly from families.
“There’s a community within a community of impacted family members that are oftentimes not discussed,” she said. “We’re not hearing about the lack of support that these family members get when they’re experiencing the anxiety, when they’re experiencing the post secondary trauma. That, those things, are not coming up in court”.
What Heat Does to the Body and the Mind
Halsey said the heat affected everything such as thinking, sleeping, staying calm. “Anybody that knows anything about when it gets hot, people’s attitudes change,” he said. “So try doing that tenfold…I’m locked up. I’m on these psych meds. I’m trying to get better. Things are just not what they need to be right now.”
Lindsay saw the same thing. “There was a lot of fights. I think it was the heat because people were aggravated,” he said. “You would have more fights in the summer than you did in the winter.”
Both men described older incarcerated people struggling the most. “There are a lot of older inmates in TDC now,” Halsey said. “And I’ve seen a lot of them through heat strokes.”
The Science
Dr. Carlee Purdum, a sociologist at the University of Houston who studies disasters and vulnerable populations, said the heat inside prisons is not just uncomfortable, it’s a chronic environmental hazard.
“Exposure to excessive extreme heat, especially in an institutional setting, is chronic. It doesn’t start and stop necessarily,” she said.
Purdum said researchers have never been allowed to collect independent temperature data inside Texas prisons.
“We definitely have the tools to collect and, um, to collect and understand a more comprehensive picture of what temperatures look like inside of Texas prisons. But, uh, it’s very challenging for scientists to inform those processes or to access those sites to collect that data,” she said.
The data TDCJ does collect, she said, is limited.
“My most significant challenge with interpreting and, and drawing, full meaning from that data is that it doesn’t take into account other environmental factors like humidity, or even those temperature points, as I understand it are taken at one point during the day and at one place inside of the unit,” she said.
Heat also affects mental health. “We see higher numbers of suicide attempts in the summer months,” Purdum said. “Heat is associated with these types of deaths and injuries, even if it’s difficult to classify them directly.”
And the effects don’t end at release.
“People are coming back out and working to reintegrate back into their communities. And when a person is coming out of a facility where they were exposed to excessive or extreme temperatures. Their health is going to be impacted,” she said. “That then becomes a public safety issue because people have additional challenges to reintegrating safely back into society.”
“Better Than Nothing, But…”
Many of the units Halsey and Lindsay lived in were built decades ago, some more than a century old. Halsey said the construction of the building itself made the heat worse.
“Most of your original red brick units… it’s hot because think about it. Brick. Like an oven.,” he said.
Lindsay said some units had windows that could be raised, which helped when it rained or when a breeze came through. But others, especially transfer facilities, only had one industrial fan for dozens of people.
“You suffered,” he said. “You’re actually just like being baked alive.”
TDCJ has said in court filings and public statements that it provides mitigation measures during extreme heat extra water, cool showers, respite areas.
Halsey said those measures existed, but not consistently.
“TDC came up with the idea of cooling you down and having water sent to you and all this old mess,” he said. “But that don’t work, y’all. It’s better than nothing, but most of the time it don’t get done because you got to have staff to do that.”
Lindsay said officers were suffering too. “They was in the same situation,” he said.
He used to joke with them: “You gonna do more time than me because you trying to retire. I’m gonna go home. You’ll still be here when I’m gone,” he said.
What the Courtroom Leaves Out
Dominick has followed the trial closely, including reviewing transcripts from the preliminary hearings.
A pedestrian carries documents past the federal courthouse in Austin, Texas, on May 2. Inside, is the site of an ongoing legal battle as Texas defends its prison conditions against claims of extreme, life-threatening heat.
Photo by Emmanuella Desruisseaux via Houston Newsroom
She said the courtroom discussions focus heavily on technical issues, “cool bed” methodology, construction timelines but not the daily reality families describe.
“In court, you’ve got two sides of attorneys and they have a specific strategy and a specific agenda,” she said. “They’re not hearing about the mother who lost their child and is wailing at night and may now be suicidal herself because she has lost a child.”
She said the trial also doesn’t capture the emotional and psychological toll of chronic heat.
Dominick said the trial revealed something families have long suspected: the temperature logs provided to legislators are unreliable.
“Some of the things that came out about the hearing were the fraudulent temperature logs that have been given to the legislators,” she said. “They’re supposed to state heat deaths, and they have not reported heat deaths that came up during the hearing as legitimate heat.”
She said part of the problem is structural. “TDCJ doesn’t have a policy that allows people to take core body temperature at the time of death. So we’ve even heard from their medical examiners who hadn’t been provided certain information,” she said.
Families also report that mitigation measures often fail in practice.
“It is not uncommon for a family member to call down and say, ‘Hey, my loved one has not received water in the last six hours’ and get hung up on. ‘Can you do a wellness check on my loved one? I haven’t heard them’” she said.
She pointed to the case of Jason Wilson brought up in trial, an incarcerated volunteer with TPCA. “We had a volunteer, Brittany Robertson, who was working with Jason and had called down to do a wellness check and was told he was just fine,” she said. “Four days later, we found out he had passed away.”
A System Strained by Staffing Shortages
Dominick said many of the failures families report come down to staffing. “The bottom line is TDCJ doesn’t have enough staff to make them incredibly effective,” she said.
She said families are often bounced between agencies.
“Oftentimes we will email legislators and legislators will then tell us that they don’t handle that and that we need to refer back to the Ombudsman’s office. So there’s this kind of back and forth situation,” she said.
The Trial
In court, much of the debate centered on how quickly TDCJ can install air‑conditioning.
Dominick said the agency is using “probably the slowest methodology,” and at its current pace, it could take more than two decades to cool all units.
“By our calculations and based on expert testimony it could be done in 36 to 45 months. But at the current trajectory, we’re looking at roughly 23 years,” she said.
She said that timeline doesn’t reflect the urgency families feel every summer.
Back in Houston
As we wrapped up outside the hospital, Halsey hesitated, the memories still heavy, then let himself smile and thanked me for listening.
The cool air around was different from the heat he says he remembered on the inside.
“Honestly, you all, it’s unbearable…Yeah you’re doing time. Yeah of course. But that does not constitute somebody making you suffer,” Halsey said.