On September 26, Futurism ran a piece by Joe Wilkins headlined “Climate Change Is Turning Prisons Full of Human Beings Into Industrial-Scale Air Fryers.” He gives two examples, Italy and Texas. In both, the prisons have no air conditioning.
In Italy, for example, record summer heat has turned hundreds of detention centers into de facto torture chambers. As the New York Times reports, temperatures inside prison cells across the Italian peninsula have regularly exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit, choking detainees, staff and visitors alike.
Because Italy’s 200-some carceral centers lack air conditioning, let alone basic fans and ventilation systems, the unprecedented heat has placed a “significant strain on correctional facilities, exacerbating pre-existing logistical problems,” according to a report by Italian prison watchdog Antigone.
That’s on top of Italy’s ongoing crisis of prison overcrowding — according to the NYT, the country has almost 65,000 inmates held in custody, despite a housing capacity of 47,000.
https://futurism.com/science-energy/climate-change-prisons-incarceration
Italy’s prisons were crowded long before this summer. In 2010 the government declared a state of emergency over overcrowding, when the system held 67,961 prisoners, about 151% of capacity. In January 2013 the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Torreggiani and Others v. Italy that the overcrowding was inhuman and degrading treatment, and that the problem was structural. Italy had more prisoners in 2010 than it has today.
Futurism’s next paragraph supplies the cause itself.
Unfortunately, relief seems unlikely, both in the immediate-term and in the hot years ahead. As head of Italy’s penitentiary administration department Stefano Carmine De Michele admitted in a July press conference, air conditioning isn’t even “being considered” for the country’s prisons.
That is a decision made by the people who run the prisons.
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