Amid record heat, 24 Arizona prison units still lack air conditioning. A lawmaker has questions.

Cooling systems in Arizona state prisons failed this summer as temperatures hit triple digits.

Now, the reported outages have caught the attention of a state legislator who is demanding that leaders at the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry answer questions about it. To that end, Rep. Walt Blackman, a Republican from Snowflake, issued a subpoena for the agency to provide information on extreme heat in Arizona prisons, related medical incidents and the age and viability of existing cooling infrastructure.

Air conditioning is not a given in Arizona prisons in the first place.

Many units rely on swamp coolers, fans and Styrofoam coolers filled with ice to combat the summer heat.

And it’s been a hot summer.

Phoenix and Yuma experienced the second-hottest meteorological summer on record, according to the U.S. National Weather Service Phoenix. In Yuma, temperatures remained in the triple digits for 142 consecutive days, while the count surpassed 100 days in Phoenix.

And though ADCRR created a heat mitigation plan to ensure an adequate living environment when temperatures rise above 85 degrees, incarcerated people and advocates say extreme heat still gets through.

Three years ago, the state Legislature allocated $47.6 million to convert prisons to heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems in fiscal year 2023. The following year, the state budget included $66.8 million to continue the work, with a three-year spending plan putting $29.8 million toward HVAC in fiscal year 2025 and $23.7 million in 2026.

But the plan was cut short when the Legislature slashed the appropriation by $57 million in the 2025 budget, leaving the department with $9.8 million and a dead end in converting the remaining units to air conditioning.

As a result, a total of 24 units — 20 of which are occupied by incarcerated people — still run on swamp coolers.

Thomas Steres lives in one of them.

Steres sleeps on a top bunk at the end of the hallway in the Barchey Unit at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Buckeye. The sun beats down on the wall next to his bed for most of the day, and it doesn’t cool until around 11 p.m.

He points a fan at his face and takes showers, but he still sweats through the night.

“I am unable to have a nice night’s sleep,” Steres said.

Some rooms in Barchey are air-conditioned. Cold air flows through the guard offices, classrooms and library, which sit empty most of the time.

The window to the guard office fogs up as cold glass meets high temperatures and humidity — the heat undeterred by the swamp coolers whirring in the unit.

“I’m not hating on the fact that guards have A/C. They shouldn’t have to work in swamp cooler temps during humid 113-degree weather,” Steres said. “But on the same token, I shouldn’t have to live in those conditions, either.”

Across the state prison system and in units like Barchey, the Corrections Department deploys an Extreme Heat Safety and Relief Strategy.

In work and housing areas not equipped with air conditioning, the department brings in portable cooling equipment and ice machines, provides incarcerated people with free ice and ice water — though some reported receiving moldy ice earlier this summer — runs misting systems, sets up temporary cooling stations, allows increased access to showers and relaxes its standards on how incarcerated people dress.

As part of the plan, the department also takes ambient temperature readings between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., with one check before noon and another after 4 p.m.

Temperature readings are not publicly reported, but some studies have come close to painting a picture of conditions inside prisons.

In a 2024 study, Ufuoma Ovienmhada, then a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now a Baker Endowed Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Climate Change and Human Resiliency at the University of Arizona, used air temperature data and atmospheric modeling to record summer temperatures at 1,614 prisons across the U.S. between 1990 and 2023.

“The type of research that’s been emerging just gives a different window into what’s happening, that has been, up to now, very invisible and held in the bodies of incarcerated people,” Ovienmhada said.

Facilities exposed to the most heat were, by and large, located in the Southwest.

Arizona State Prison Complex-Lewis recorded the fifth-highest temperature overall at nearly 114 degrees. Fourteen more state-owned and contracted prisons followed closely behind, including Phoenix West, Perryville, Phoenix, Yuma, La Palma, Red Rock, Central Arizona Correctional Facility and Eyman.

“It just starts to give us a picture of how to characterize the exposure, the risk, the hazard that people incarcerated are facing,” Ovienmhada said. “It’s not rocket science to then bridge if the outdoor temperature is regularly 100 degrees at this prison, and they don’t have air conditioning. The people inside are probably experiencing that temperature, if not worse.”

Ovienmhada also looked at how factors in the construction and operation of prisons can make incarcerated populations more vulnerable to extreme heat, including materials such as metal, brick and concrete; overcrowding; understaffing; and an inadequate health care system.

As the summer rolled on, so did litigation against ADCRR over its constitutionally deficient health care system, leading to a receivership, recently cleared to at least initially go into effect by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. 

Nothing in the court order explicitly addresses heat-related illness, but Corene Kendrick, an attorney litigating the case and deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, said housing populations more vulnerable to extreme heat — namely older incarcerated people and those diagnosed with mental illness — appeared to have taken priority when the department started converting units to air conditioning.

But heat still takes a toll on the general population, and studies show incarcerated people are at higher risk of heat-related morbidity and mortality because of confinement.

Lawsuits in Texas, Louisiana, Florida and Missouri have sought to argue that extreme heat exposure constitutes cruel and unusual punishment or violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, citing exacerbated health conditions and fatalities.

In May 2025, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in Western Texas initially ruled that extreme heat in prisons was “plainly unconstitutional,” but he did not decide whether to order the Texas prison system to install air conditioning.

Texas corrections officials put the cost at more than $1 billion, and Pitman is now considering whether to mandate air conditioning installation.

Rio Scharf, a staff attorney at the University of California, Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law and Justice Center who studies extreme heat in carceral settings, noted that litigation can be crucial to prompting change in extreme heat conditions.

“Because these have a decent price tag on them, and because they benefit a population that has very little political representation and attention, our assessment is that it’s very unlikely that state legislatures will appropriate sufficient funding to address this issue without the pressure of litigation and/or a really active social movement,” Scharf said.

Cooling system failures and units without air conditioning could come back before the Arizona Legislature soon, though..

In an Aug. 31 email to Corrections Department leaders, Blackman asked for information on cooling system failures, heat-related medical incidents among incarcerated people and staff, heat complaints, compliance with the department’s cooling strategy and logs of indoor temperatures. He also asked them to provide a rundown of funding and legislative needs.

“My purpose in requesting this information is not to presume the cause of these problems or assign responsibility before the facts are known,” Blackman wrote. “My office wants to determine whether the challenges facing these facilities are primarily the result of aging infrastructure, routine maintenance and repair issues, equipment reliability, funding limitations, or some combination of these factors.”

Blackman set a deadline of Sept. 11 for the agency to respond.

An ADCRR spokesperson acknowledged Blackman’s request and said in a statement that “ADCRR fulfills all official public records requests in compliance with Arizona public records law.”