Jail411 archive report
Published March 6, 2026 · Updated March 22, 2026
Somewhere inside the Plane State Jail last summer, Crystal Gayle Frank watched another woman hit the floor. It was the third time that week.
"People fall out, pass out, and seize so many times," Frank said of conditions during the brutal summer of 2024. "You stop being shocked by it. You just drag them to where the air is a little cooler and hope somebody with a radio notices."
She is one of roughly 100,000 people locked inside Texas's 565 correctional facilities, and the heat she describes is not an anomaly. It is the norm. Two-thirds of state prisons in Texas lack full air conditioning, and the people warehoused inside them are cooking.
The Numbers Nobody Wanted to See
A year-long analysis of four years of heat data, conducted by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, confirmed what incarcerated people and their families have been saying for decades: every single non-air-conditioned facility in the TDCJ system — save one — regularly exceeded 85 degrees indoors. Many topped 90. Some climbed well beyond that.
Eighty-five degrees matters because it is the maximum temperature the state of Texas sets for its county jails. That same state also regulates temperatures in animal shelters. But for state prisons — the facilities housing the longest sentences and the most vulnerable populations — there is no temperature standard at all.
Read that again. Texas tells counties how cool to keep people awaiting trial. It tells shelters how cool to keep dogs. And it tells its own prison system absolutely nothing.
Deaths in the Heat
Multiple heat-related deaths have been documented inside Texas prisons over the past decade, though the true count is almost certainly higher. TDCJ does not maintain a centralized, publicly accessible death database, and its paper-based records have been shown to be unreliable — the same record-keeping failures that led to 34 wrongful releases over the past ten years.
A federal judge has already ruled that conditions in at least one Texas prison were unconstitutional due to extreme heat. That ruling changed little for the broader system. The heat kept coming. The people kept falling out.
For families trying to visit someone in jail or prison during Texas summers, the conditions are immediately apparent. Visiting rooms in non-AC units are stifling. Children sit in plastic chairs, sweating through their clothes, watching their parents sweat through theirs.
A Fix That Is Eight Years Away
House Bill 3006, currently moving through the Texas Legislature, would require air conditioning in all TDCJ facilities — by 2032. That is eight years from now. It is worth understanding what that timeline means: at least eight more Texas summers of 95-degree housing units, eight more years of people seizing on concrete floors, eight more years of families burying people whose death certificates will list natural causes while their cellmates know better.
The bill faces opposition from lawmakers who point to the cost of retrofitting aging facilities. And they are not wrong that the price tag is enormous. But the cost of doing nothing is measured in a currency the Legislature has so far been willing to spend: human suffering inside facilities most Texans never see.
It is important to understand the distinction between jails and prisons here. County jails, which hold people short-term and pre-trial, are regulated. State prisons, which hold people for years and decades, are not. The people with the longest exposure to these conditions have the fewest protections.
What Comes Next
Crystal Gayle Frank is no longer at Plane State Jail. But thousands of others are still inside facilities just like it, facing another summer with no air conditioning and no enforceable temperature limit. Across Harris County facilities and throughout the TDCJ system, the question is not whether the heat will come. It always comes. The question is whether anyone in Austin will act before the next name gets added to a list that nobody is keeping.