April Barber Scales recalls her 18 summers spent incarcerated without air conditioning at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh — the state’s largest women’s prison — as physically and mentally demanding as she said relief from the grueling heat was hard to come by. She dripped sweat constantly, felt endlessly sticky and even saw people faint from the heat.
“Miserable is an understatement,” she said, describing the sweltering heat. “I mean, prison is miserable, and then when you have 1,000 people that are hot, and then you have attitudes, and then you couple that with the staff with the attitudes for being hot. It’s so much worse during the summer.”
Barber Scales said she was desperate for any way to cool down during the stretches of summer that felt like they would never end.
She kept a wet towel draped around the back of her neck, re-wetting it many times a day. She took an extra shower midday whenever she could, not fully drying off so the dampness could help her stay cool. She drank as much water as possible to stay hydrated.
At night, she wet her sheets in the sink in her cell and then laid down on top of them, hoping for enough relief from the hot temperatures so she could drift off to sleep. Prison staff placed a fan in the aisle of her housing unit, but she said its air flow didn’t reach her bed.
“I would just toss and turn until I wore myself out enough so I could go to sleep,” Barber Scales explained. “That adds to the aggravation, to the agitation, because people are hot. They haven't slept.”
Barber Scales was released from prison in 2022, but thousands of incarcerated people are still experiencing life behind bars without air conditioning.
Twenty-one percent of the state’s total prison capacity — 8,579 beds — still don’t have air conditioning, Brad Deen, spokesperson for the Department of Adult Correction, told NC Health News.
Family, friends and advocates for incarcerated people are increasingly concerned for the health of their loved ones during the sweltering summer months.
Kayla Dillard, executive director of NC-CURE, a prison advocacy group, said that summer days without air conditioning are a “type of torture.”
“There’s always a concern of heat stroke because they have nowhere to escape it,” Dillard said.
The heat affects correctional officers, too, who work in the same conditions as the people they’re charged with monitoring.
Like many places around the United States, periods of extreme heat have intensified in North Carolina. On average, July is the warmest month of the year, with average high temperatures nearing 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
Climate change is making extreme heat events — unusually hot weather that can last for several days — more frequent and intense, posing health risks. Exposure to extreme heat can exacerbate underlying illnesses, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and asthma. Extreme heat can also have negative effects on mental health and has been linked to increased rates of suicide.
“The NC Department of Adult Correction recognizes that heat can be a serious health and safety issue for everyone — our staff and the people in our custody alike — and we do all we can to keep people comfortable in hot weather,” Deen said.
Deen told NC Health News that last year one person experienced a heat stroke, the most serious heat-related illness that occurs when the body can no longer control its temperature. Over the past five years, Deen said there have been no heat-related deaths in state prisons.
In facilities without air conditioning, correctional staff follow a heat stress management plan that outlines protocols to mitigate the risk of heat-related illnesses, such as employing industrial fans, passing out ice water and limiting program activity during the hottest parts of the day.
Four prisons don’t have any air conditioning, and another 18 are only partially air conditioned, according to the Department of Adult Correction’s prison air conditioning status dashboard.
Air conditioning upgrades
Work is underway to bring air conditioning to all prison living spaces by the end of 2026, according to prison officials.
In 2021, state lawmakers allocated $30 million to retrofit older prison buildings with cooling systems. The multi-year project involves upgrading 37 correctional facilities — including more than 100 buildings and more than 12,000 beds — that lack air conditioning either partially or completely.
Deen said the project has since received additional funding from 13 other sources, increasing the budget to $92.7 million.
Prison officials have pointed out that the age of the buildings — most 50 years old or more — make upgrades especially challenging, as they were not designed to accommodate air conditioning systems.
In June 2023, a prison spokesperson sent a news release heralding the completion of the first project — one unit at Caswell Correctional Center, a men’s medium-security prison.
Progress has continued. Since the cooling system installation began two years ago, Deen told NC Health News that 5,308 beds have gained air conditioning.
Work is underway at eight prisons representing 4,129 beds, Deen said. By the end of September, he said, 1,225 of these beds are expected to be air conditioned.
Some of the work is being completed by incarcerated men who are part of the Department of Adult Correction’s Construction Apprenticeship Program. About 150 incarcerated men are working with 50 staff members on the air conditioning upgrades.
Bringing air conditioning to the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh, which has 1,563 beds, is one of the largest projects. Before the start of the upgrades, only 199 beds at the women’s prison were air conditioned. Deen said the prison’s Sparrow dorm will soon be re-occupied after cooling system installation and repair work, bringing the total air conditioned beds to 439 — or just under one-third of the prison.
“It’s obviously more comfortable in an air conditioned environment,” Deen said. “Lack of air conditioning is a factor in staff recruiting and overall satisfaction in the prison environment for offenders and staff.”
After more than a dozen summers spent without air conditioning at the Raleigh women’s prison, Barber Scales was transferred to Southern Correctional Institution in Troy, which had air conditioning. She called it a night and day difference, arguing that air conditioning is not a luxury — it’s a standard of living.
Extreme heat is a growing concern
Extreme heat is a problem in prisons and jails across the country. In recent decades, the number of dangerous humid heat days in carceral facilities has increased, according to research published in the journal Nature Sustainability in 2024.
Robbie Parks, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University who led the research, said climate change is “supercharging” the number of extreme heat days faced by incarcerated people and will pose a risk into the future without proper intervention. Nearly a million incarcerated people — 45 percent of the estimated total incarcerated population — are housed in facilities seeing an increase in dangerous humidity and heat, his research found. The facilities are primarily in the South.
Parks noted that incarcerated people are disproportionately susceptible to dangerous heat, given the preexisting health conditions many people have. In particular, he said, older people and those taking mental health medications — a growing portion of North Carolina’s prison population — are at increased risk for heat illness. Incarcerated people also don’t have the same agency people in the community have to take action to cool themselves, he said, creating a “perfect storm of vulnerability.”
When temperatures spike, most people can reduce their heat exposure by turning up their air conditioning, opening a window, moving to a cooler area or getting a glass of water. However, incarcerated populations rarely have the freedom to take such measures.
Ufuoma Ovienmhada, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Arizona studying prison environmental health hazards, including the effect of extreme heat, said incarcerated people’s conditions of confinement also make them more vulnerable to extreme heat.
“What makes heat a particularly acute issue for a lot of prison facilities has a lot to do with the material that these buildings are made out of, from brick, concrete, lots of metal, often with the cells,” Ovienmhada said. “Those are all materials that absorb a lot of heat and release it very, very slowly. So even after a heat wave has passed, that building might still be retaining a lot of that heat — more than a different type of residential building or office building.”
A 2024 study in the journal GeoHealth led by Ovienmhada and other researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined summer heat exposure in prisons across the United States and identified nine facility-level characteristics that put incarcerated people and staff at higher risk. Among the factors are highly restricted movement, poor staffing and inadequate mental health treatment.
For example, Ovienmhada said that most prison heat mitigation strategies are reliant on staff, which can be hampered by widespread correctional staffing shortages. If a prison has poor staffing, she said the likelihood of heat intervention procedures being completed to their fullest might go down.
For years, the North Carolina prison system has struggled with chronic correctional officer shortages. Department Secretary Leslie Cooley Dismukes told state lawmakers during her May 14 confirmation hearing that the correctional officer vacancy rate across the North Carolina prison system is near 40 percent, and the shortage is a “direct threat to public safety.”
Women in Raleigh, which has been recently upgraded with new air
conditioning ductwork, fire alarms, charging ports and new paint.
While air conditioning won’t fix all issues related to heat, Ovienmhada said it’s one of the most effective interventions to reduce heat exposure — and creates dual benefits for incarcerated people and staff.
“Putting people in a metal box that can be over 100 degrees for multiple days at a time, multiple weeks at a time, in some cases, is not rehabilitating,” Ovienmhada said.
The vast majority of states don’t have universal air conditioning in their prisons. The lack of air conditioning amid rising temperatures has become the subject of lawsuits in some states, such as Texas and Florida, as incarcerated people have alleged that extreme temperatures are “cruel and unusual punishment” under the U.S. Constitution.
When North Carolina prisons become fully air conditioned, as anticipated in 2026, Parks said the state will be “an example for the rest of the country.”
This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
