Texas Officials Testify That Cost to Air Condition Prisons Tops $1.5 Billion
by Chuck Sharman
During a trial in the federal court hearing a challenge to excessive heat in state prisons on March 31, 2026, new Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) Director Bobby Lumpkin testified that the cost to fully air condition every cell for all 132,250 state prisoners would near $1.5 billion.
The trial came almost a year after the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas declared the excessive heat in TDCJ lockups unconstitutional; but as PLN reported, the court declined to issue a preliminary injunction (PI) ordering the prison system to remedy the problem, citing little chance it could be accomplished within the 90 days before a PI expires, as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e. [See: PLN, May 2025, p.57.]
Since then, lead Plaintiff Bernhardt Tiede was dismissed from the suit by the district court on March 16, 2026, which found his claims mooted by a change to TDCJ policy that provides a “heat score” sufficient for assignment to a “cool bed” to all prisoners 65 and over (Tiede was by then 67). As PLN also reported, many of those “cool beds” are in repurposed isolation units, where access is restricted to programming and recreation. [See: PLN, Sep. 2023, p.1.]
Defendants’ argument that all four “organizational plaintiffs” lacked standing was largely rejected, however. The district court said that Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance didn’t need members in every prison without air conditioning to sue for the harm faced in those prisons where its members were confined. As for Texas Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants, Inc. and Texas Prisons Community Advocates, the district court found that they met the “indicia of membership” requirements laid out by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit—a test not met by the Coalition for Texans with Disabilities, Inc., so it was dismissed from the suit.
Those remaining three “organizational plaintiffs” were not prisoners, so they were not bound by the requirement to exhaust administrative remedies found in the PLRA, the district court said. It also rejected Defendants’ argument that the PLRA barred the relief that Plaintiffs sought—system-wide air conditioning in all TDCJ facilities—because the Fifth Circuit has held that prospective relief does not trigger those provisions of the PLRA.
The district court also rejected Defendants’ last argument for summary judgment—that there was insufficient evidence of their personal knowledge of the unconstitutional conditions to establish deliberate indifference to a serious harm in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The evidence rather showed that TDCJ “largely continued to rely on heat-mitigation measures that have proved ineffective in the past,” the district court said, with only “minor changes to [TDJ] policy, such as requiring automated temperature monitoring.” The prison system’s “own reporting to the Texas Legislature,” furthermore, “reflects continuing … high numbers of heat-related illnesses and that thousands of heat-related grievances continue to be filed every year.”
TDCJ also pointed to its goal of fully air conditioning all facilities by 2033. But Plaintiffs pointed to the actual pace of air conditioning installation in 2023 and 2024, which would delay system-wide completion until 2054. Taken together, these facts were “at least sufficient to show that there is a genuine issue of material fact as to whether TDCJ’s continued reliance on mitigation measures reflects deliberate indifference to the risks of extreme heat,” the district court declared. See: Tiede v. Lumpkin, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 54893 (W.D. Tex.).
It was at the bench trial which followed on March 30, 2026, where the TDCJ made its $1.5 billion air conditioning cost claim, according to the Texas Tribune. There is precedent for taking it with grain of salt; at a 2017 trial over the same issue that was limited to the Wallace Pack Unit, prison officials cited a $20 million estimate to cool the lockup, trimming it just a year later by 80% to just $4 million, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Feb. 2019, p.45.] The trial concluded in early April 2026, and PLN will continue to update developments. See: Tex. Citizens United for Rehab. of Errants, Inc. v. Lumpkin, USDC (W.D. Tex.), Case No. 1:23-cv-01004.
Additional source: Texas Tribune
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Related legal case
Tiede v. Lumpkin
| Year | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Cite | 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 54893 (W.D. Tex.) |
| Level | District Court |