Last summer, Kenneth Barrett recalls spending 46 days — roughly half the summer — in solitary confinement at Algoa Correctional Center, a minimum security prison in Jefferson City, Missouri.
In segregation, he was confined to a cell roughly the size of a parking spot for 23 hours a day. Barrett said he had brown tap water to drink, chilled only by the occasional delivery of ice. There were no electrical outlets to plug in a fan, he said. And no escape from his cell except for a warm or hot shower, three times a week. He said he remembers a correctional officer telling him that it was 107 degrees outside his cell one day, which made sense, because the overhead vents only recirculated hot air.
Algoa, a nearly century-old facility, is one of four prisons in the state with no air conditioning in any of the housing units, according to the Missouri Department of Corrections. As Barrett tells it, conditions throughout the prison are “among the worst” he’s experienced in his more than six years in behind bars. But it was in solitary confinement where he feared for his life: His cell had no button to push in case of a medical emergency, he said.
On May 12, attorneys with the MacArthur Justice Center, a civil rights legal organization, filed a class action lawsuit against officials at the Missouri Department of Corrections on behalf of people incarcerated at Algoa, alleging that the prison’s “brutally hot” conditions constitute cruel and unusual punishment for those forced to endure dangerous temperatures with little to no relief.
In interviews with The Marshall Project – St. Louis, and sworn statements to The MacArthur Justice Center, men incarcerated at Algoa, Ozark Correctional Center and Moberly Correctional Center described the effects of unrelenting heat in facilities with limited or no air conditioning.
Their experiences underscore the unique dangers of extreme heat for people in solitary, also known as administrative segregation (ad-seg for short), or the hole.
Barrett was among nearly two dozen incarcerated men who provided sworn statements in support of the civil rights complaint. Accounts of his experience are drawn from his testimony.
“When medical emergencies like heat stroke occurred, we had to kick on the doors and scream for help,” Barrett wrote in his sworn statement. “Often, it took over an hour for anyone to come. Sometimes, no one came to help.”
When correctional officers did respond to the noise, Barrett said, officers frequently punished people for speaking up by writing them up for a disturbance. When he experienced his own symptoms of heat stroke — lightheadedness, nausea, and chest pains that made it hard to breathe — he reported himself to medical, but still wasn’t allowed to leave his cell, he said.
The complaint calls for the Missouri Department of Corrections to develop a heat mitigation plan to respond to future heat emergencies at Algoa, including maintaining a “safe indoor temperature between 65 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit” inside every unit in the prison. The new safety plan should also include revised policies for solitary confinement, and for medically vulnerable populations. If the state is unable to implement a plan, the complaint argues three of the incarcerated petitioners with less than a year left on their sentences should be released.
Missouri Department of Corrections Communications Director Karen Pojmann said ice is delivered to restrictive housing units, such as solitary confinement, three or more times a day. She added that Centurion, the prison’s medical provider, has “numerous protocols in place for all institutions” when temperatures rise above 90 degrees, including “additional checks on elderly residents, chronically ill residents and residents taking certain medications.”
However, the accounts of men incarcerated during the summer at several Missouri prisons suggest the state’s heat mitigation efforts have fallen short.
“Some of these rooms down in ad-seg can get easy triple digit heat indexes for days at a time,” David Blackledge, who is incarcerated at the partially air-conditioned Moberly Correctional Center, wrote using the prison’s email system to The Marshall Project – St. Louis in response to questions about his experience.
He described a heat so oppressive that it was impossible to get more than 2 to 4 hours of sleep a night. When the ice machines worked, rather than using the ice to cool his water, Blackledge said he would use the ice to chill his bedsheets. “At bedtime I take my clothes off, wrap my body in the frozen sheet, and then mummify myself,” he wrote.
“I really thought I was going to die from heat stroke last year,” he wrote. “The heat gets so bad it often causes panic attacks. Hallucinations are not uncommon.”
Extreme heat makes being in the hole even worse. The heat is a “compounding force” that exacerbates existing physical and mental health challenges that often come with solitary confinement, according to David Cloud, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University School of Medicine. Cloud published a study in 2023 on the correlation between extreme heat and suicide watch in solitary.
In Louisiana prisons without air conditioning, Cloud found the rate of daily suicide watch incidents increased by 29% when the heat index reached the “caution” level, defined for the study as 80-89 degrees Fahrenheit. Daily incidents increased by 36% when the heat index reached “extreme caution,” defined as 90-103 F. Since people in solitary have exceptionally limited freedom of movement, Cloud said extreme heat not only can cause physiological harm, but increases the likelihood of “that slow agony of psychological pain.”
The temperature reached 97 degrees last year in Jefferson City, where Algoa and another state prison are located, according to Extreme Weather Watch, an archive of historical weather patterns. But temperature alone is an incomplete indicator of how hot it really feels in humid places. In an expert report for the civil rights case, University of Arizona postdoctoral fellow Ufuoma Ovienmhada recorded a heat index (a temperature measurement that also includes humidity) of up to 110 degrees outside Algoa some days last summer. She also noted that the temperature inside the prison was likely hotter because the building materials absorb the sun’s heat all day.
The risk of heat exhaustion is ever-present in prison. The first signs of heat exhaustion include profuse sweating, lightheadedness, clammy skin and a weak pulse. The symptoms can quickly turn to heatstroke. If left untreated, heatstroke can lead to organ failure, permanent neurological damage, and disability or death. The key to avoiding death or long-term injury is to treat symptoms swiftly by cooling the body down externally, and by hydrating with plenty of fluids.
People in prison don’t have that option, said Dr. Fred Rottnek, former medical director at the St. Louis County jail. The traditional ways to “self-cool” such as taking a cold shower, going to a cooling center or turning on the AC aren’t available. Incarcerated people’s health during a heat emergency is almost entirely dependent on ”the ability to get help from staffers, either medical or security,” Rottnek pointed out.
Extreme heat intensified medical and mental health conditions for Allen Fuller, who was incarcerated at Algoa in the summer of 2024. Fuller wrote in his sworn statement that he has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder (characterized by symptoms of both schizophrenia and mood disorders such as bipolar disorder) and suicidal tendencies, and also struggles with another medical condition that causes near-daily vomiting.
“I hear voices that get more pronounced when I am hot. My mind starts playing tricks on me,” Fuller wrote. “When I told staff I was hearing voices, they told me to stay under my fan,” he said, adding that he also vomits more frequently in the heat.
“The staff response to anything seems to be to send people to the hole,” Fuller continued, adding that incarcerated people’s pleas for help are often met with yelling and screaming. “I know we did wrong and that is why we are here, but we are still humans and have rights.”
Incarcerated people said extreme heat also makes prison conditions worse. In the humidity, beds begin to sweat until they rust. Cockroaches are driven out of their crawlspaces and into people’s cells. Irritability and desperation cause fights to break out over the last cup of ice, or the final spot in the rec room.
“You just lay in your bunk and wanna die,” Cole Ogle, who is incarcerated at Ozark Correctional Center, another facility with no air conditioning, told The Marshall Project – St. Louis.
Ogle said the heat at Ozark, a minimum security prison that focuses on substance use treatment, exacerbates an already tense atmosphere. Even the personal fans, available only to a subset of the prison population who can afford them or land a spot in the coveted free fan program, do little but blow more hot air around the cells. The prison often cancels outdoor recreation on the hottest days, Ogle added, even if it’s slightly cooler outside.
Pojmann, the spokesperson for the Missouri DOC, said in an email that facilities without air conditioning in the housing units “have the means to effectively circulate air through the wings” and keep residents cool using “industrial fans, misting fans, sprinkling stations, cold drinking water and ice machines.” If ice machines struggle to keep up with the demand for ice, Pojmann said, “facility administrators are instructed to purchase as much supplemental ice as necessary.”
While air conditioning might seem like the most straightforward solution to the problem, implementing AC is costly, and not always possible. Prison renovations can cost taxpayers millions of dollars. And some of the oldest prison buildings can’t be outfitted with air-conditioning units throughout the building due to their age, according to Pojmann. (Incarcerated people report that even these buildings noticeably have air conditioning in administrative offices, classrooms, clinics and other areas where staff work — just not in the housing units where incarcerated people live.)
Access to air conditioning can also be weaponized in prison. Ovienmhada, the postdoctoral fellow, who is also one of the lead authors of a national study of extreme heat in US prisons, pointed to examples from incarcerated people she’s interviewed of correctional officers coercively withholding air conditioning, or blasting the AC to dangerously low temperatures as punishment.
Because these prisons are unable to offer meaningful reprieve from the heat to incarcerated people, Ovienmhada and Cloud have suggested the release of vulnerable people from prison as one solution.
“Building new prisons with air conditioning is not the solution,” said Cloud, the Duke University researcher. “We have to talk about closing prisons that keep people in these types of conditions.”
The MacArthur Justice Center lawsuit calls for swift policy change at Algoa. Jefferson City has already seen a handful of days in the 80s this year, including a high of 86 degrees in April. Shubra Ohri, one of the lead attorneys in the case, stressed that steadily rising temperatures across the state each summer mean that danger is imminent. A heat emergency could strike in a matter of weeks, she said, and, “Algoa isn’t ready.”
As a minimum security prison, Algoa largely houses people who are nearing the end of their sentences. Because of extreme summer temperatures, some — like Arnez Merriweather, who is scheduled for release in October — worry they may never make it home. Merriweather recently learned his kidneys are failing, which increases his risk of life-threatening consequences from extreme heat.
“If you want to know what Hell feels like, it is summer at Algoa,” Merriweather wrote in his sworn statement. “I need to survive this summer so I can get home… and I’m terrified of what will happen.”
