According to Indiana Department of Corrections, as of May 2024, there were almost 23,000 adult male offenders and nearly 2,400 adult female offenders in state facilities. Photo from Adobe Stock.

By Terri Dee
Indiana News Service

INDIANA — As Hoosiers continue to endure the hot, dry weather, convenient access to cool air is a godsend but Indiana’s incarcerated are not so lucky, as many correctional buildings do not have air conditioning systems.

The facilities are unbearable during the day and into the night, when the humidity levels are expected to drop but sometimes do not. Heritage Trail and Plainfield correctional facility inmates say their complaints about the lack of cool air have fallen on deaf ears and are denied grievance forms by staff.

Brian Dawe, national director of the corrections officer advocacy group One Voice United, said temperatures in most prisons without air conditioning can exceed 100 degrees in the summer.

“When you start increasing the temperatures in those facilities, it’s not good for anybody,” Dawe asserted. “It increases the violence. It’s a miserable set of conditions.”

No state or federal laws mandate installing air conditioning in Indiana prisons. The Indiana Department of Corrections said the inmates are free to access grievance forms at any time by way of the facility’s unit officers, case managers, or grievance coordinator, but have failed to do so.

Data from the Prison Policy Initiative show 12% of people in Indiana prisons are age 55 and older.

Naseem Miller, senior editor for health at The Journalist’s Resource, said this demographic is more likely to succumb to heat illness or have a chronic disease triggered by unrelenting heat.

“Another factor that makes incarcerated people more vulnerable is that the population in prisons is aging,” Miller pointed out. “Aging makes you more vulnerable to extreme heat.”

A 2023 study found a 10-degree temperature increase from average summer temperatures in prison was associated with a more than 5% increase in prison deaths. Sweltering heat also increased the number of suicides in prisons by more than 20%.