Do you think that in hot climates, jails and prisons should have air conditioning?

Large swamp coolers would suffice, if the climate is dry enough. Otherwise, the prison could be built underground.

Yes, I do. I visited the Fremantle Gaol a few years ago. It was in use until 1991. Temperatures of 52 degrees celsius were recorded in the cells at times. That’s just inhumane.

Beyond removing people from society, I don’t think prison should be about meting out cruel and unusal punishment. I think housing people in accommodation that reaches extreme high or low temperatures fits that bill.

I should say, Australian public schools often don’t have any air con either. I think that’s plain crazy. So while I feel for people living in the prison system, I’d also like us to invest in our schools and ensure our kids are studying in healthy environments.

I think having large windows would be better. Nothing more refreshing than wind through the window in summer. It’s also cheaper.

They should be opened at night to make the rooms fresher.

And of course, put them in every cell. It won’t work otherwise.

I think they’re a bit worried about big windows in gaols. Something to do with people escaping. I know in the Freo gaol, the windows were a tiny little opening high on the wall. It must have been hell.

I do take your point though @Sneki2. I love having my windows open and catching the breeze. Especially at night. In summer, the humidity can make air con a preferable option when it’s very hot here.

It it’s expensive to do work to maintain towers for air conditioning, that sounds like a pretty reasonable task to try to assign to some prisoners who are interested in training and doing that work. Just a thought.

I think prisons should be humane. They should be to rehabilitate people, and should take into account that many of the prisoners are in for non-heinous offenses, and that some of them may have been wrongly convicted. They should not be torture centers.

The conditions in them should not be insufferable.

There are many ways the US prison system needs to be reworked, and this is just one of them.

Yes. If we are trying at rehabilitation and not torture.

Yes, this is 2017 not 1917. AC and heat are a standard, everyday part of modern life and are not luxuries anymore. Prisoners deserve to be treated humanely while incarcerated.

WTH?! LA jails without AC? That’s ludicrous in my opinion. Upstate NY I can see it, although I’d like to think they could at least put in a portable AC for the hottest months, even if it only brings the temp down to 80 degrees, but in a southern state? That is mind boggling to me that LA doesn’t have air conditioning in some jails.

This becomes very affordable if we stop jailing minor drug offenders and only lock people up for murder/violence, sex offenses, burglary and white-collar crimes (like crashing the economy… still waiting on that one).

Yes, absolutely. They are not there to be tortured. And they’re not there to be treated spitefully by people (the State, or the actual jailers) because they “deserve” it.

In the worst case scenario a six month sentence could become a death sentence. Prolonged extreme heat is a killer.

Definitely. Not having it in hot weather would be cruel and unusual punishment.

Of course. I would never even consider otherwise.

Yes, if possible, jails and prisons should provide air conditioning. They are required to provide food, water, a bed, etc. Some would argue that AC is not a basic need and a luxury of course, but I think that staying cool during blisteringly hot days is essential to overall mental and physical health. I mean, try sleeping in a 90 degree (F) room and see how fun that is. If you can’t sleep it starts to take a toll on you. And as someone else said, prisons should be about rehabilitation and not torture. It is a punishment, but it should also be a learning process and a way to change your perspective on life overall.

Yes. Especially if they don’t have open windows to the outside.

I would mention that my elementary school didn’t have AC either. It mostly wasn’t a problem because the majority of the school year was in fall, winter and spring, but the were a few times it got pretty hot up there on the second floor.

Nope. Maybe large fans to draw heat up and out. I disagree with the entire idea that jails are only for removing people from society. Like it or not, that is a punishment. So my thinking is that if we make jails some place people really don’t want to go, they will work harder to stay out. And if they don’t, then I don’t think we need to spend more money on them to make their lives better.

@seawulf575 If we opened the doors to a jail with AC, how many people do you think would run into it and how many would run out? Not having freedom is, in itself, a severe punishment. If you want to save money, reducing the recidivism rate (rate that prisoners return to jail after being released) is paramount. That means investing a small amount of money upfront on having our jails help rehabilitate prisoners will return huge dividends in not having to keep that prisoner for years and years if he reoffends later.

^ What he said.

@gorillapaws, on the surface that sounds good. But we have established tons of programs to help rehabilitate prisoners already. So the question then becomes: are they making any difference at all? The answer to that is a resounding “no”. Recidivism rates continue to climb regardless of what is done in prison. Meanwhile there are many places where prisoners are offered more opportunities than civilians not in prison. They have options of getting college degrees that they don’t have to pay a cent for, in example. How about AC as well? There are poor people in our society that don’t have AC for a number of reasons. So if they are expected to survive without AC, why wouldn’t we expect the same from those in our society that have shown they don’t believe in the laws of our nation?

Putting AC in a jail will not make people want to run in there. That is a simple attempt to reword the statement. The statement is that if you make a prison or jail some place people really don’t want to go, they may try to avoid it. If you take away the amenities and make it a truly painful punishment, MAYBE some that go there will think “Huh…I don’t want to ever come back here and will do whatever I can to avoid it!” As I stated before, these criminals are already being punished. We have tried many efforts to “rehabilitating” them which include better conditions in the jail. These efforts have cost this country billions and have shown no significant effect. I suggest we just stop making the extra effort. Taking away AC is one example. It won’t make a whit of difference to the truly evil inmates…they will get out and commit more crimes because that is who they are. But it might make a difference to the first time offenders or those that are more “petty” criminals.

It wouldn’t take an open door. A simple vent out of the roof would work. And they have vents anyway.

Heat causes people to become violent, you know. Can you imagine what it would be like on the 4th or 5th floors?

@seawulf575 “Recidivism rates continue to climb regardless of what is done in prison.”

Do you have any evidence to support this claim? This article about Norway’s prison system directly contradicts your statement. The US has the 2nd highest incarceration rate per capita in the world (behind Seychelles which only has 735 prisoners total and can be ignored as an outlier). That costs a ton of taxpayer dollars to keep going.

People inherently do not want to go to jail (the point of my thought experiment). You don’t need to make it as nasty as possible. That’s not an effective deterrent. Jail itself is already a deterrent. There are decades of research that contradict your position. Read up on Alexander Maconochie and how his approach to prison reform revolutionized prisons. People who commit crimes aren’t expecting to get caught, that has a lot to do with why the hardline approach doesn’t work well.

@gorillapaws Norway has an interesting system going, I’ll give you that. I could debate all day long the pluses and minuses of how a system like that might work in the US. A big difference is the size of the criminal population. There are about 5 million people in Norway total. There are about 2.5 million criminals in the US. The space alone needed to create something like what Norway does would be staggering. I will be honest, the link you offered I had to pass on because I didn’t feel like turning off my ad blocker to read it. However I did find other articles dealing with it. One I found from the Guardian is a review of Bastoy island.
It houses 115 prisoners. It is 2.6 sq km in size. That equates to about 5 acres per prisoner.
To convert that to US prisoners, it would take an area of about 19,500 sq miles or more than Vermont and New Hampshire put together. So which states are going to give themselves up to support this? Want to go state by state? Okay, let’s pick California as an example. It would take 1500 sq miles just to house the prisoners. That is about 1% of their total area.
That is huge. But I wonder, have you ever done more research into Norway’s crime statistics? I was looking into it and came up with an interesting statistic that jumped out at me. The total number of crimes per 1000 people. In Norway, it is at 72.73, in the US it is 41.29. Now that is all crimes but it does show a staggering thing…people are almost twice as likely to commit a crime in Norway as opposed to the US. Why would that be? It could be that the punishments don’t really fit the crimes. For instance, in the article I read, we had a murderer on Bastoy island. He killed in revenge…it was planned. He was sentenced to 8 years on Bastoy island where he is treated with respect and given many comforts. Meanwhile, his victim is dead and that victim’s family and friends have lost someone they love. But that’s okay…they punished the criminal, right?
And all this still ignores my other contention. If we treated prisoners as they do in Norway, how many would find a better quality of life in prison than in society? If we are sending a message that you can live in society without AC or a job or any number of things OR you can commit a crime and go to prison and have all those things, what exactly is that message?

I think it’s the utter loss of freedom that hurts the most.
No more sleeping in, in a soft, comfy bed, with a woman next to you.
No more going out to eat. And the food is hideous.
No more than the occasional phone call, which you have to pay for.
No more privacy using the bathroom, or taking a shower.
No more watching whatever you want on TV.

On the outside you at least have the hope of getting AC, or whatever it is you’re lacking.

I don’t see the merits of making prisons or jails just intolerable. If there is merit in it, why don’t we confine them to a 6X6 cell, 24/7?