The state board was dissolved vote unanimously to create long-awaited indoor heat standards for California workers. After the last legal review, this means protection for millions of people who have jobs in warehouses, kitchens and other workplaces that are getting too hot because of the warming climate.
The board makes an interesting exception, however – for prisons and jails. The state Department of Finance has withdrawn its support for the standard when it was to be approved in March, noting that the rule would cost prisons and jails. billion dollars. To enforce these regulations, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, known as Cal/OSHA, excluding these facilities of the standard.
Opponents of the standard show the high costs associated with installing and running cooling systems, offering workers more breaks and other ways to adapt to the heat. And adapting to climate change is costly. So excluding prisons and jails may seem like a straightforward and pragmatic way to reduce the costs of regulations that will surely be expensive.
Research has suggested, however, that regulations can save up $875 million each year by preventing heat-related injuries among California workers. And the threat is just a lot more urgent: The end of summer is in hottest on recordand this one can prove even hotter.
very hot kill other people than all other extreme weather events or natural disasters, although these deaths are often difficult to ascertain and tend to be underestimated by official numbers. Heat can also cause a variety of illnesses and injuries, from kidney disorders, strokes and fatigue to workplace accidents. And heat can exacerbate underlying health conditions.
The need for indoor heat regulation is, in short, clear. Lives can be saved by implementing these rules quickly, especially when the summer heat descends.
Cal/OSHA has indicated that it may eventually develop separate standards for California’s prisons and jails. But it took almost a decade to come close to indoor heat standards for other facilities. Because of the high cost of cooling prisons, the sense that air conditioning is a “luxury” and the dehumanizing belief that people imprisoned do not deserve such care, it seems unlikely that we will see a separate heat standard for such facilities anytime soon.
But the dangers of heat in California prisons and jails are undeniable. Prisoners are more susceptible to heatstroke for a number of reasons, including the location of jails and prisons, the way they are built, the lack of air conditioning and ventilation in general, the prevalence among prisoners of health conditions that can lead to heatstroke and their use. of psychiatric drugs that exacerbate the effects of heat. Imprisoned people are on the bleeding edge because of their vulnerability to climate change.
California has a moral and legal obligation to ensure that incarcerated people are protected from the heat. As a law scholar Sharon Dorovich has detail, the right of society to imprison anyone is rooted in “carceral bargaining” created by the state that entails “an ongoing affirmative obligation to meet the basic human needs” of inmates. The constitutional prohibition of cruel punishment makes this duty “non-negotiable.”
The state failed to uphold its end of this offer. A new survey of people in prison in California found that two-thirds of respondents have experienced extreme heat and that country plan to protect him has not been done.
Like climate adaptation, incarcerating people is expensive: California spends about $132,860 a year in the common fund to keep one person in custody. If we cannot meet their basic needs, we must let them go.
The state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office disbanded calculated that killing five California prisons would save $1 billion a year. Close the prison under a road map developed by Californians United for Responsible Budgeting can cover the cost of climate-proofing existing facilities. with 13,000 empty beds, the number is projected to swell more, we have the capacity to do so.
Downsizing the dilapidated and bloated prison system makes fiscal sense for states in the red. And as temperatures continue to rise, closing prisons and jails is an increasingly promising strategy for pragmatic and ethical climate adaptation that won’t break the bank and will save lives.
Nicholas Sapiro is the director of the Carceral Ecologies Lab at UCLA. Bharat Jayram Venkat is the director of the UCLA Heat Lab.