As record-breaking heat waves make headlines across the country this summer, well over 100,000 people in the U.S. South sit locked inside state prisons with no air conditioning. “We are basically sitting in an oven, slow-cooking,” said Demetrius Cotchery, who is incarcerated in Alabama’s Childersburg Community Work Center, a prison that lacks air conditioning despite outdoor temperatures that hover above 90 degrees Fahrenheit in summer. In Texas, state lawmakers have repeatedly failed to pass legislation funding universal air conditioning in state prisons, even as climate change exacerbates stifling conditions and temperatures inside Texas prisons regularly hit 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Although a handful of southern states that once seemed unlikely to budge on prison cooling are now taking steps to invest in climate control, some prisoner advocates argue that the solution is to incarcerate fewer people through policies like sentencing reforms, rather than pouring more money into mass incarceration. Click the link in our bio to read more.