B A PARKER, HOST:
Hey, everyone. You're listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm B.A. Parker. Now, the summer has been hot, and it's no exception. Last year and the year before, both set new records for being the hottest year at the time. So with the heat of summer upon us, I'm talking to a few of my colleagues at the Climate Desk about some of the people who have been most negatively affected by the heat. We're talking from Florida to Texas to California. So welcome to CODE SWITCH, Alejandra Borunda.
ALEJANDRA BORUNDA, BYLINE: Hey, Parker. I am so glad to be here. And I am a climate reporter at NPR. I cover how climate change affects human health.
PARKER: Climate change. Generally not good for human health.
BORUNDA: No, it is not. And the heat increases that have come with climate change especially impact workers and their health. A while back, I was at a training for union workers about how to stay safe when you're working in really hot conditions, like in factories or warehouses or restaurant kitchens.
DANIEL CHRISTOPHER: Me and heat don't get along.
BORUNDA: One of the workers I met was Daniel Christopher. He lives near Oakland, California, and he worked in oil refineries.
CHRISTOPHER: I've been in 105 degree heat, being in the sun three, four, five hours, no air circulation, no shade.
BORUNDA: And he told me that he's had some scary situations in the past.
CHRISTOPHER: You stop sweating. You start getting chills, and me and a co-worker of mine, we almost died out there. It was that bad.
PARKER: That sounds awful.
BORUNDA: Yeah. And Daniel wasn't exaggerating in saying that this kind of heat can be deadly.
PARKER: And when you say deadly, like, how many people are dying this way?
BORUNDA: A lot. Thousands that we know of each year in the U.S., but that's just the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately. I've been talking to researchers, doctors, nurses, other experts - and all of them have been telling me the same thing. We are massively undercounting the number of deaths caused by heat, maybe even by a factor of 10 or more.
PARKER: Wow.
BORUNDA: And this will surprise probably no one listening to this. The people losing their lives are disproportionately poor people, elderly people and people of color. It's the people laboring outside, tending and picking our food or working in very hot indoor conditions like kitchens and warehouses. It's migrants and incarcerated people.
PARKER: So all the vulnerable people who don't have a lot of power to demand better conditions?
BORUNDA: Yeah, exactly.
CHRISTOPHER: When work has to be done, it has to be done. You can't do the work, we'll find somebody else to do it for you.
BORUNDA: And the problem is obviously getting worse as the Earth gets hotter because heat waves are getting longer and more severe. My colleague on NPR's Climate Desk talked to Yonatan Vasquez. His brother Wilmer was a roofer, who died in the heat in Florida.
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YONATAN VASQUEZ: I have to explain to people that my brother died, and it was because of being the hottest year on record. And it's only going to get worse, 'cause people they don't realize how hot it is. When they go to the house, to the work, everything's air conditioned. They only feel it like 20 minutes out of the whole day, and they don't understand when you feel it for 10 to 12 hours a day, how much your body has to work.
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PARKER: So as summer is heating up, on this episode of CODE SWITCH we're digging into why so many people are dying from the heat - and whose lives we value enough to count their deaths and try to prevent them.
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PARKER: OK. Alejandra, I have a naive question. So if you're cold, you can always bundle up. But how do you de-warm. Like, you can't take off your skin.
BORUNDA: That is not a naive question at all. It's actually pretty simple. Rest, shade and water breaks.
PARKER: Yeah. I mean, that's pretty intuitive. So if you work outside, like, harvesting food or doing construction or delivering mail and it's super hot, you need rest, shade and water breaks to stay safe.
BORUNDA: Exactly. It's not that complicated. But if you don't get these basic protections, things can go wrong really fast. My colleague Rebecca Hersher has reported on this.
PARKER: Hey. Welcome back to CODE SWITCH, Becky.
REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: Hey, Parker. And yeah, as Alejandra said, I've been reporting on people who have died from extreme heat and also from other climate-related severe weather. You know, digging into who they were, how they died, and also how their loved ones have been affected by all of this. And one of those people is the roofer that Alejandra mentioned earlier from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
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VASQUEZ: Hello. My name is Yonatan Vasquez, and I'm a roofer. Here to talk to about my brother Wilmer Vasquez.
PARKER: So Becky, tell me about Wilmer.
HERSHER: So Wilmer was 29 years old. He had a 3-year-old son. And yeah, he was a roofer. In fact, he was from this family of roofers, like his dad, a bunch of uncles and his brother, they all did this kind of work. His dad and uncles had started in the field when they first came to the U.S. from El Salvador, and then the boys just followed in their footsteps.
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VASQUEZ: I wish I would chose a different career path, honestly. I'd rather be something else.
HERSHER: That's Wilmer's older brother Yonatan.
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VASQUEZ: I was born in '92, and he was born in '93.
HERSHER: They worked together, and Yonatan says Wilmer was always the more extroverted brother. Like, they're really close in age. They're only a year apart. And as kids, they hung out a lot.
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VASQUEZ: Me and my brother was fighting to see who would get the top bunk bed (laughter).
HERSHER: They went to the same schools. They would skip school sometimes and just hang out.
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VASQUEZ: And what I would usually do is just cook him some egg and pancake. And we'd just watch TV, you know, like "Jerry Springer" and "Price Is Right," you know?
HERSHER: They were basically always together, so their differences stuck out.
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VASQUEZ: I mean, he just wanted to be around people. You know, he was always encouraging people, you know, making sure they were doing good. He liked to be the center of attention. I mean, he would dance on the roof, like, that kind of stuff. He'll make sure at least he'll get people laughing. I mean, I could care less about people. I'm the total opposite. We had the same wavelength but, like, different - I don't know - vibration, I guess I would say. He would like rap music. I like classic rock. He knew a lot about sports and movies, and I like science stuff. It was just opposite sides of things.
HERSHER: So you have these two brothers. They're super different. But they both end up working as roofers, and they'd usually work six, sometimes seven days a week. Like, Yonatan and I ended up talking on a Saturday evening 'cause that was the only time he wasn't working.
PARKER: I mean, I'm not going to lie. That sounds like exhausting work.
HERSHER: Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, long days. You're outside. You're hauling shingles and piles and buckets of hot tar up and down ladders exposed to the elements. And meanwhile, you know, the weather in south Florida has been getting hotter and hotter. So they were working in these dangerously hot conditions every summer.
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VASQUEZ: Roofing is - it's a dangerous job, and you always see accidents, you know? Summer is probably the worst. That's where you probably see the - more accidents.
HERSHER: Is it hotter up there than it is on the ground?
VASQUEZ: Yeah. It's about probably, like, a hundred and forty, a hundred fifty degrees. If you touch one of the tiles, it burns your hands, especially, like, the asphalt shingles. They absorb a lot of heat. To me, what gets me the most is probably the humidity. I think that's what got to my brother as well. You would see him take out his socks and it'd just be drenched. I mean, when I first started doing it, I used to cramp up like crazy. There was a couple of times where I thought I was going to die. Like, I'd just start seeing the light just going in and in and out, in and out, like, oh, my God. I couldn't open up my fingers, and everybody told me my body felt cold.
PARKER: Felt cold. Why cold?
HERSHER: Yeah. It's weird, right? It's a way that the body reacts to overheating. So, like, you feel cold. You have muscle cramps, loss of consciousness. Those are actually all symptoms of potentially deadly heat illness. And Yonatan told me that those symptoms are common among the roofers that he works with in south Florida, which is really scary. You know, there aren't worker protections for roofers like Yonatan and Wilmer. There's no shade at most of the worksites. There's a lot of pressure to finish jobs quickly, so there aren't a lot of water breaks or time to let your body cool off.
PARKER: So these guys are just out there being exposed to potentially deadly heat for days and days in the summer.
HERSHER: Basically, yeah. And Yonatan was particularly worried about his brother because Wilmer wasn't in as good shape as Yonatan was - that's what Yonatan says - and he was more nonchalant about the heat.
PARKER: Nonchalant in what way?
HERSHER: Like, Yonatan is pretty obsessive about drinking a lot of water, even when he's not working, like in the evening before he goes to work. And he wears these long-sleeve, like, fishing shirts, you know, that wick moisture and a big straw hat to protect himself from the sun and keep his body cool. Wilmer, you know, not so much on all those protections.
PARKER: I guess it's just another way in which they're both kind of opposite personalities.
HERSHER: Yeah, exactly. But, you know, it freaked Yonatan out because Wilmer seemed to struggle more on the hot days. And he was so worried about it that he actually tried to get his brother to switch careers.
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VASQUEZ: Like, maybe try a factory, you know? Try something you work inside 'cause I don't think you can handle outside. And I'm telling my brother, you know, he should probably just call it quits. Like, no, but if I be a truck driver, I'm going to talk to nobody, just me all alone. I don't think he would've liked that.
HERSHER: You know, Wilmer had actually already kind of tried an alternative career path. So after high school, he did some college, and then he joined the Navy. And he hated it, according to Yonatan, because it was so lonely, like, being on a ship for months on end. He was miserable. So he came home, and he became a roofer like all the other men in his family. And the reality is, if he hadn't become a roofer, he would probably still be alive.
PARKER: So what happened?
HERSHER: Well, it happened in August of 2023.
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VASQUEZ: The day was humid. That's what I remember. From what I remember, it was, like, 91 degrees that day, but with the humidity, it's probably, like, 98.
HERSHER: And remember, it's a lot hotter on the roof, well over a hundred degrees. Wilmer was working on a roof around noon in the heat of the day. And at some point in the afternoon, when Yonatan had finished work at a different site, he started getting calls from Wilmer's colleagues.
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VASQUEZ: I remember people calling me. Hey, how's your brother? He really cramped up today, man. Like, we had to take him out of the car.
PARKER: He couldn't drive himself?
HERSHER: No. He was too sick from the heat. And when he got home - you know, they brought him home - his muscles were cramping. He was super dizzy.
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VASQUEZ: Yeah. He didn't want to be in the AC. Anytime you'd put AC on him or a fan, he'd tell you take it away.
PARKER: So there's that weird symptom again - feeling cold, even though you're overheating.
HERSHER: Yeah, exactly. It's a really common heat illness symptom. But remember, they'd been going through things like this before. You know, they'd had these symptoms before. So Yonatan figured if his brother rested and drank Gatorade, he'd feel better the next day. But instead, Wilmer's condition worsened overnight.
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VASQUEZ: His body just felt cold, like, completely cold cold. And he was not responsive at all. Like, my brother told him, stand up. He tried to stand up, and he just laid on the bed there.
HERSHER: So early in the morning, Yonatan calls an ambulance. They take Wilmer to the hospital. Yonatan has to go to work because, you know, no paid leave for roofers. So he goes to work. And a few hours later, he's on his way to a job site, and he gets a call from the hospital because he was Wilmer's emergency contact, and they tell him to come right away. Wilmer had died.
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VASQUEZ: I didn't really cry at all until the doctor told my mom, you know, 'cause my mom just - like, her soul left her body and just looked right at me. And she's like - she just - and her face is like, are you for real? Like, it's true. And then we went inside, and that's when I think I broke down.
PARKER: The pain of that must be unimaginable. And this is something that he's, like, seen coming or at least thought of as a possibility. Like...
HERSHER: Right.
PARKER: ...It must be scary to go to work every day.
HERSHER: Yeah. I think it is scary. I think he's worried for his own safety.
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VASQUEZ: No, I don't want my mom to bury another son.
PARKER: Becky, with all of this grief, I wonder, has Yonatan ever thought about leaving roofing?
HERSHER: Yeah. He's thought about it a lot, actually. He told me that if he wasn't a roofer, he would want to work in IT - but that would obviously require going back to school, which is expensive. And, you know, he's good at being a roofer. These are skills he has. It's the job he has. And even if he left roofing, someone else would still do this job, right? You know, the solution is not that we don't have roofs. It's that the people who repair and install those roofs do the work without being exposed to deadly heat.
PARKER: Yeah. I mean, no one should be exposed to deadly heat. Like, this is preventable.
HERSHER: Right. It is preventable. And my colleague Alejandra has been reporting on this.
PARKER: Hey, Alejandra.
BORUNDA: Hello again. And yeah, there have been a few states in recent years that have passed rules protecting workers from heat - including California, where I went to that training for union workers. But at the same time, other states are actively trying to prevent heat protections for workers - that's states like Florida and Texas where millions of people work in really hot conditions.
PARKER: Yeah, like Yonatan.
BORUNDA: Exactly. But it's not just state governments that have the power to fix this problem. The Biden administration had started working hard on a federal heat rule through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration - or OSHA - and that was a big deal because people thought it would save lives. Daniel, the man I met at the training, explained the importance of OSHA rules.
CHRISTOPHER: That's why every OSHA law or every rule is written in blood because it happened to somebody.
BORUNDA: But the future of that rule under the Trump administration is unclear.
HERSHER: And there was a recent hearing about how that proposed heat rule could impact workers, including roofers.
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RICHARD TESSIER: I want to give a brief perspective from the employee side of the roofing industry.
HERSHER: The safety director from the Roofers Union testified. His name is Richard Tessier.
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RICHARD TESSIER: Almost every building in this country has a roof.
HERSHER: And he said on a 90 degree day, a roof will generally be 120 degrees or hotter.
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RICHARD TESSIER: Year after year, roofing has been between the second and fourth most dangerous occupation in the United States, a stat that we're not proud of. But without OSHA's standards, we could easily have been No. 1. Standards do work.
HERSHER: So he supports the proposed heat rule, which would protect roofers who are working in these extremely hot conditions.
BORUNDA: Yeah, a lot of people have that position. Now, it's up to OSHA whether to actually move forward with - and eventually pass such a rule, which is - to be clear - a super long process. It usually takes about seven years from start to finish, and we're just a couple years into that.
PARKER: OK, let's see what happens.
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PARKER: Thank you, Alejandra and Becky.
BORUNDA: Yeah, you're welcome.
HERSHER: You're welcome.
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PARKER: Coming up, we're leaving Florida and going to the prisons of Texas.
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TERRY CANALES: We're cooking human beings. It's just - there's no other way to explain it.
PARKER: That's coming up. Stay with us.
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PARKER: Parker, just Parker, CODE SWITCH. I'm joined now by Lauren McGaughy. She's an investigative reporter and editor for The Texas Newsroom. Lauren covers all kinds of issues, but criminal justice and government accountability are at the top of the list. Hey, Lauren.
LAUREN MCGAUGHY, BYLINE: Hey, Parker.
PARKER: So you've spent a lot of time covering Texas prisons.
MCGAUGHY: Yeah, you know, I've written about criminal justice for more than a dozen years now all over the South, actually. And one thing I've spent a lot of time researching is climate control behind bars, you know, like heating and air conditioning.
PARKER: That seems like a pretty niche topic. With all of the problems with prison conditions, why did you choose that?
MCGAUGHY: Well, lots of state prisons across the country lack AC and heat. That means most incarcerated people - including in those states with huge prison populations like California and Texas - are left dealing with extreme temperatures.
PARKER: And it gets hot there in the summer, right?
MCGAUGHY: Oh, yeah. I mean, for some context, Texas has more than a hundred prisons. Two-thirds of them don't have AC. That means most of the 137,000 people incarcerated in Texas have no temperature control. For example, it was over 99 degrees for 16 days last August at a prison about an hour from the Gulf Coast. And those temperatures were taken by the prison agency staff inside the prison cells. Compare that to county jails and animal shelters, they're required to keep the indoor temperature between 65 and 85 degrees for safety reasons. State prisons don't have any such requirements.
PARKER: Wait, so dogs have better temperature treatment than inmates?
CANALES: We don't even let people do this to animals. We arrest people for putting a dog in the back of a pickup truck in Texas if it's too hot. And these are human beings, and I've said it over and over. We're cooking human beings. It's just -- there's no other way to explain it.
MCGAUGHY: That's Terry Canales. He's the state lawmaker who keeps trying to force the state to address this problem. He's filed bills for years to require AC in prisons. They've gotten traction the last couple of sessions in the Texas House, but they always die in the Senate.
CANALES: This will be my seventh session in the legislature. Fourteen years, and they've never done a damn thing other than kill people.
MCGAUGHY: State prison officials admit that the temperature can be dangerous for prison staff and inmates, but they really don't want to acknowledge people are dying behind bars. At best, they'll really only say that the heat may have contributed to three people's deaths.
PARKER: May have. Possibly have.
MCGAUGHY: Right. There were three deaths linked to the heat in summer 2023. Elizabeth Hagerty was one of those people. She was finishing out her sentence at the Murray Unit, which is a female prison in a town called Gatesville. Elizabeth was a month out from getting released, but then she got really sick.
PARKER: What happened?
MCGAUGHY: Well, she told the prison doctors that the heat was keeping her from eating and drinking. But instead of keeping her in the medical unit, where she may have had access to air conditioning, doctors sent her back to her cell, and the temperature there was in the mid-90s. Elizabeth actually sent a message to her partner's mother, Martha Romero, just before her death.
MARTHA ROMERO: Her last email to me was telling me that she was so hot and she was hungry and she just couldn't wait to come home, basically, you know?
MCGAUGHY: Elizabeth never made it home. She died there in the prison just before her scheduled release. She was 37 years old.
PARKER: What did they say killed her?
MCGAUGHY: The cause of death, according to the state, was severely low sodium in her body, likely caused by a combination of repeated vomiting and dehydration. Here's Martha again.
ROMERO: But I do believe that heat played a major role in her death and that of other inmates, too.
MCGAUGHY: But the state of Texas still refuses to count Elizabeth's death as a heat death. They'll only say it may have been, quote-unquote, heat-related.
PARKER: All of this sounds like the state is playing word games - like, heat deaths versus heat-related deaths.
MCGAUGHY: Yeah. Well, the state counted Elizabeth's death as natural, even though it was sudden and unexpected. A big problem was they never took her internal body temperature, so it's hard to prove how important a factor heat was in her death.
PARKER: Did they take the temperatures of the other people who may have died from the heat?
MCGAUGHY: They did, actually. One was John Castillo. He was 32 years old when he died, and John's core body temperature at the time was 107.5 degrees.
PARKER: What?
MCGAUGHY: Yeah. His death, the state says, was also natural.
PARKER: Where did John die?
MCGAUGHY: Like Elizabeth, John also died at a prison in the town of Gatesville. Gatesville is smack-dab in the middle of Texas, like, an hour and a half north of Austin. So to better understand the place, I took a trip out there. The town itself is mostly white, but the prisoners are not. Two-thirds of those incarcerated here are people of color.
PARKER: I can't say that's surprising.
MCGAUGHY: Yeah. And also, more than half of the town's population is behind bars in one of the six prisons there. If you aren't in the prison, you probably work or live near one.
PARKER: Wow, so this really is a prison town.
MCGAUGHY: That's right. And according to the state's own records, two of those prisons in Gatesville are among the top 10 hottest in the state. The temperatures inside the cells at one unit topped out at 104.7 degrees the summer of 2023.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Thank you all for joining us here in Gatesville.
MCGAUGHY: It was hot the day I drove down last August, but I had a good reason for going. It was for a vigil being held just for people like Elizabeth and John, who died in the heat. The event was hosted by a group of formerly incarcerated women called Lioness Justice Impacted Women's Alliance. Around 8 p.m., they all gathered around the county courthouse downtown. Volunteers lit candles and placed them on the building's white limestone steps. It was twilight and the cicadas were out, but the temperature still hadn't let up. It hovered in the mid-90s.
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DONISE CHERRY: Texas is one of the cruelest state I've ever seen when it comes to incarcerated people.
MCGAUGHY: Taking the mic, Donise Cherry, who spent decades in Gatesville's prisons, thought aloud about her sisters still incarcerated just up the road.
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CHERRY: They cooking now. Me personally, I can tell you it's been many a night that I had to soak my clothes in water to - just to get cooled off. And I still didn't get cooled off because the dorm read 140 degrees.
MCGAUGHY: Donise talked about how the heat makes people desperate - picking fights, starting fires, even resorting to self-harm. They'll do anything to get moved out of the hot cells and into air conditioning. She said the head of the state prisons department, whose name is Bryan Collier, should be on notice.
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CHERRY: What I would say to Bryan Collier is, God sits high and he looks low. And the heat that they are going through, that I went through for 33 1/2 years, is ridiculous. Let's see him sit in a cell.
PARKER: Wait. So how does the state defend not having AC?
MCGAUGHY: Well, Collier says this job isn't as simple as just installing a window unit. I mean, these prisons are massive and old. Some of them were built before the Civil War. He estimates fixing the problem system-wide could cost $1 billion and take a quarter of a century. In the meantime, the prison gives inmates extra water fans. Some medically vulnerable people are moved out of the heat. Even correctional officers fall out because of the heat. In fact, it's the fifth leading cause of serious injury on the job among prison staff. Then there's the deaths. The vigil closed out with a prayer for them.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: For those who suffer tonight, may they know relief. May they be given mercy. May cool breezes, human-made or of nature, be visited upon them. May they survive. For those for whom we could not save, we lift up their memory.
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PARKER: OK, so what now? Is anything going to change?
MCGAUGHY: Well, now their deaths are part of this massive federal lawsuit against the Texas state prison agency. The main plaintiff in the case is this guy Bernie Tiede. His name might sound familiar because he happens to be someone that had a movie made about his crime.
PARKER: I mean, he sounds familiar to me because I'm a film nerd. But that was the guy in Richard Linklater's film "Bernie," right?
MCGAUGHY: Yeah. And the real-life Bernie is a couple decades into his prison sentence now. He's suing the state because he says he had a stroke in a hot cell a couple years ago, which left him with impaired speech and cognition. Linklater, the director, has become a friend and advocate.
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RICHARD LINKLATER: Today, I'm here on behalf of Bernie Tiede and thousands of others who are enduring inhumane conditions within the Texas prison system.
PARKER: So what's been happening with that case?
MCGAUGHY: Bernie and his lawyers had a big hearing in federal court at the end of last summer. On the stand, he testified that all incarcerated people should have access to AC. And Bernie's lawyers argued that conditions in Texas prisons are unconstitutional. They said the state is likely undercounting heat deaths, covering them up so that the high temperatures behind bars don't look as deadly as they really are. Here's Jeff Edwards. This is Bernie's lead lawyer.
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JEFF EDWARDS: To suggest to the community, to the citizens of Texas that the heat is not killing people in the Texas prison system is an absolute falsehood. It's outrageous. It's wrong. And that's what our case is all about.
PARKER: Huh. He sounds confident and angry.
MCGAUGHY: Well, he's fought this case before. After a spate of deaths in summer 2012, Edwards sued to get AC installed in a prison that houses older people. The state ended up agreeing to fix the problem but just at that one unit, the geriatric prison. Collier, that prison department head, also testified under oath last summer. He admitted the heat was a problem, but he said the state is doing enough to mitigate it, and he emphasized they'd need millions in state funding to fix the problem. He did come up against one big problem, though.
PARKER: OK. But what is that?
MCGAUGHY: Well, when the state's lawyers were making their case, they showed this document of temperature readings from one of the state prisons. It claims that the outdoor heat at a prison in Beaumont on the coast in July 2022 was 79 degrees. The judge, I mean, he almost laughed. He looked up the weather from that day on his phone and saw that the high was 96 degrees.
PARKER: So what happened next?
MCGAUGHY: Well, the judge ordered prison officials to look into it. We found out that they actually did an internal investigation and found that heat readings were likely fabricated at this prison. That's important because these documents are used to determine whether prisoners get special relief during a heat wave, like extra water or canceled work details.
PARKER: OK. So not only were the prisoners living in these overheated cells, but the prison had falsified the records?
MCGAUGHY: That's right.
PARKER: All right. So what about that federal lawsuit? It's been nearly a year. Has the judge made a decision?
MCGAUGHY: Not quite. In March, the judge issued an order. In it, he said he does believe the heat in Texas prisons is unconstitutional, that basically it violates the rights of inmates to be living in those conditions.
PARKER: I mean, that sounds like a win.
MCGAUGHY: Well, yeah, but he didn't order AC to be immediately installed.
PARKER: So the conditions are unconstitutional, but there's not a rush to change it.
MCGAUGHY: Yeah. I mean, in his order, the judge acknowledged how complex and expensive actually fixing this will be.
PARKER: I'm guessing funneling a billion dollars into the state prison system wouldn't be an easy sell in Texas.
MCGAUGHY: You're not wrong. And, you know, this isn't just a Texas problem. This same fight has played out in courts and state capitals across the country. You know what sometimes kick-starts change?
PARKER: What?
MCGAUGHY: Celebrities, of course.
PARKER: Sadly, that sounds about right.
MCGAUGHY: Yeah. Like, Jay-Z and Yo Gotti sued to spur the Mississippi prison system to install AC there.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Two American rap moguls are suing the Mississippi Department of Corrections.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Gotti and rapper Jay-Z teamed up together to file lawsuits on behalf of dozens of inmates.
PARKER: And that worked.
MCGAUGHY: It did, and that's what prisoners in Mississippi wanted. But change isn't going to come to Texas so quickly or easily. Advocates don't believe the state will fully fix the problem unless they're forced by court order. And even if the judge comes down on the side of incarcerated folks, the state may still appeal if they lose. So we're probably just at Step 1 in what might be a very long fight, and that means potentially years of hot summers without AC for people in Texas prisons.
PARKER: Thanks for coming on the show, Lauren.
MCGAUGHY: Thanks for having me.
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PARKER: And that's our show. You can follow us on Instagram - @nprcodeswitch. If email is more your thing, ours is codeswitch@npr.org. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the CODE SWITCH newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter. And just a reminder that signing up for CODE SWITCH+ is a great way to support our show and public media, and you'll get to listen to every episode sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch.
This episode was produced by Courtney Stein and Christina Cala. It was edited by Courtney Stein. Our engineer was Kwesi Lee. Thanks to Neela Banerjee, NPR's chief climate editor. And a big shoutout to the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive - Xavier Lopez, Jess Kung, Leah Donnella, Dalia Mortada, Veralyn Williams and Gene Demby. I'm B.A. Parker. It's hot. Please hydrate.
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