By Jennifer Chu | MIT News

When summer temperatures spike, so does our vulnerability to heat-related illness or even death. For the most part, people can take measures to reduce their heat exposure by opening a window, turning up the air conditioning, or simply getting a glass of water. But for people who are incarcerated, freedom to take such measures is often not an option. Prison populations therefore are especially vulnerable to heat exposure, due to their conditions of confinement.

A new study by MIT researchers examines summertime heat exposure in prisons across the United States and identifies characteristics within prison facilities that can further contribute to a population’s vulnerability to summer heat.

The study’s authors used high-spatial-resolution air temperature data to determine the daily average outdoor temperature for each of 1,614 prisons in the U.S., for every summer between the years 1990 and 2023. They found that the prisons that are exposed to the most extreme heat are located in the southwestern U.S., while prisons with the biggest changes in summertime heat, compared to the historical record, are in the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast, and parts of the Midwest.

Those findings are not entirely unique to prisons, as any non-prison facility or community in the same geographic locations would be exposed to similar outdoor air temperatures. But the team also looked at characteristics specific to prison facilities that could further exacerbate an incarcerated person’s vulnerability to heat exposure. They identified nine such facility-level characteristics, such as highly restricted movement, poor staffing, and inadequate mental health treatment. People living and working in prisons with any one of these characteristics may experience compounded risk to summertime heat. 

The team also looked at the demographics of 1,260 prisons in their study and found that the prisons with higher heat exposure on average also had higher proportions of non-white and Hispanic populations. The study, appearing today in the journal GeoHealth, provides policymakers and community leaders with ways to estimate, and take steps to address, a prison population’s heat risk, which they anticipate could worsen with climate change.

“This isn’t a problem because of climate change. It’s becoming a worse problem because of climate change,” says study lead author Ufuoma Ovienmhada SM ’20, PhD ’24, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, who recently completed her doctorate in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “A lot of these prisons were not built to be comfortable or humane in the first place. Climate change is just aggravating the fact that prisons are not designed to enable incarcerated populations to moderate their own exposure to environmental risk factors such as extreme heat.”

The study’s co-authors include Danielle Wood, MIT associate professor of media arts and sciences, and of AeroAstro; and Brent Minchew, MIT associate professor of geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; along with Ahmed Diongue ’24, Mia Hines-Shanks of Grinnell College, and Michael Krisch of Columbia University.

Environmental intersections

The new study is an extension of work carried out at the Media Lab, where Wood leads the Space Enabled research group. The group aims to advance social and environmental justice issues through the use of satellite data and other space-enabled technologies.

The group’s motivation to look at heat exposure in prisons came in 2020 when, as co-president of MIT’s Black Graduate Student Union, Ovienmhada took part in community organizing efforts following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

“We started to do more organizing on campus around policing and reimagining public safety. Through that lens I learned more about police and prisons as interconnected systems, and came across this intersection between prisons and environmental hazards,” says Ovienmhada, who is leading an effort to map the various environmental hazards that prisons, jails, and detention centers face. “In terms of environmental hazards, extreme heat causes some of the most acute impacts for incarcerated people.”

She, Wood, and their colleagues set out to use Earth observation data to characterize U.S. prison populations’ vulnerability, or their risk of experiencing negative impacts, from heat.

The team first looked through a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that lists the location and boundaries of carceral facilities in the U.S. From the database’s more than 6,000 prisons, jails, and detention centers, the researchers highlighted 1,614 prison-specific facilities, which together incarcerate nearly 1.4 million people, and employ about 337,000 staff.

They then looked to Daymet, a detailed weather and climate database that tracks daily temperatures across the United States, at a 1-kilometer resolution. For each of the 1,614 prison locations, they mapped the daily outdoor temperature, for every summer between the years 1990 to 2023, noting that the majority of current state and federal correctional facilities in the U.S. were built by 1990.

The team also obtained U.S. Census data on each facility’s demographic and facility-level characteristics, such as prison labor activities and conditions of confinement. One limitation of the study that the researchers acknowledge is a lack of information regarding a prison’s climate control.

“There’s no comprehensive public resource where you can look up whether a facility has air conditioning,” Ovienmhada notes. “Even in facilities with air conditioning, incarcerated people may not have regular access to those cooling systems, so our measurements of outdoor air temperature may not be far off from reality.”

Heat factors

From their analysis, the researchers found that more than 98 percent of all prisons in the U.S. experienced at least 10 days in the summer that were hotter than every previous summer, on average, for a given location. Their analysis also revealed the most heat-exposed prisons, and the prisons that experienced the highest temperatures on average, were mostly in the Southwestern U.S. The researchers note that with the exception of New Mexico, the Southwest is a region where there are no universal air conditioning regulations in state-operated prisons.

“States run their own prison systems, and there is no uniformity of data collection or policy regarding air conditioning,” says Wood, who notes that there is some information on cooling systems in some states and individual prison facilities, but the data is sparse overall, and too inconsistent to include in the group’s nationwide study.

While the researchers could not incorporate air conditioning data, they did consider other facility-level factors that could worsen the effects that outdoor heat triggers. They looked through the scientific literature on heat, health impacts, and prison conditions, and focused on 17 measurable facility-level variables that contribute to heat-related health problems. These include factors such as overcrowding and understaffing.

“We know that whenever you’re in a room that has a lot of people, it’s going to feel hotter, even if there’s air conditioning in that environment,” Ovienmhada says. “Also, staffing is a huge factor. Facilities that don’t have air conditioning but still try to do heat risk-mitigation procedures might rely on staff to distribute ice or water every few hours. If that facility is understaffed or has neglectful staff, that may increase people’s susceptibility to hot days.”

The study found that prisons with any of nine of the 17 variables showed statistically significant greater heat exposures than the prisons without those variables. Additionally, if a prison exhibits any one of the nine variables, this could worsen people’s heat risk through the combination of elevated heat exposure and vulnerability. The variables, they say, could help state regulators and activists identify prisons to prioritize for heat interventions.

“The prison population is aging, and even if you’re not in a ‘hot state,’ every state has responsibility to respond,” Wood emphasizes. “For instance, areas in the Northwest, where you might expect to be temperate overall, have experienced a number of days in recent years of increasing heat risk. A few days out of the year can still be dangerous, particularly for a population with reduced agency to regulate their own exposure to heat.”

This work was supported, in part, by NASA, the MIT Media Lab, and MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society’s Research Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism.