Rhonda Klak slipped on four pairs of socks — two pairs on her feet and another two over her hands — before falling asleep. This is how she kept warm in the winter of her year-long sentence at Lucile Plane State Jail, which was equally as brutal as summer due to the lack of heating inside the facility, Klak said.
Incarcerated people all over the US — including in Texas, Alabama, California, Connecticut, Georgia, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and New York — are exposed to frigid temperatures in winter months as jails and prisons fall into disrepair and some people say it’s intentional.
“In the summer months, we were begging for winter,” Klak said. “And when fall started coming we were all just so excited and relieved. But then the winter came and it was just unreal.”
Correctional officers promised all winter long to bring portable heaters to people incarcerated at the jail if temperatures dipped below 30 degrees. Klak was under the impression that this was mandated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice but most states, including Texas, don’t actually require correctional facilities to regulate temperatures.
“Well, the temperatures did get below and they never brought them,” Klak said. “The whole time I was there, I never saw one.”
A winter storm knocked out power all through Texas in 2021, sending temperatures in prisons and jails plunging below zero. Thousands of incarcerated people were packed in facilities without water and electricity for days. Toilets inside several jails overflowed, flooding the housing units and exacerbating unsanitary conditions. Reports of incarcerated people being exposed to the elements due to the aging infrastructure in some facilities — holes in walls and cracked and unsealed windows — emerged over the days-long power outage. Personnel confiscated blankets amid the outage and many people who were incarcerated at the time were made to sleep on the floor in freezing temperatures.
“Every single winter, the…
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