"Cooking them to Death": the Lethal Toll of Hot Prisons
"...Although there are no national figures on how many prisoners die of
heat illness, horror stories emerge every summer: inmates screaming 'Help us!' out of the windows of a St. Louis jail; New Hampshire men
flooding their scorching cells to cool them down; Arizona prisoners
whose shoes melt in the sun.
A growing segment of the incarcerated population is especially
heat-sensitive. Jails and prisons house an increasing number of people
with mental illness; as many as one in five Texas prisoners are
prescribed psychotropic medications, which make the body more vulnerable
to heat. A similar number receive blood pressure drugs, which can cause
the same problem. And the rise of longer sentences in the 1980s and 90s
has produced a surge of older prisoners, who are particularly
susceptible to heat illnesses...."
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