One month ago, a preventable death occurred once again at the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla due to a prison heatwave. Adrienne Boulware passed away from the extreme heat conditions at the correctional facility on July 6th. Her daughter, Michela Nelson, stated that Adrienne had complained about the heat for years.
You no doubt remember that in 2020 a summer of protests ensued after video surfaced of a police officer murdering George Floyd, suffocating him with his knee on his neck even after he said “I can’t breathe.” The prison officials who allowed this death to occur should be prosecuted just as the officer who killed George Floyd was. Women at Chowchilla said the heat at CCWF was like a “brick oven” and some similarly reported difficulty breathing, but there’s no video available that shows the depravity of prison officials who allowed a woman to slowly die from preventable extreme heat conditions, so you’ll have to rely on my personal account to paint the picture.
After serving 11 years at this same facility I was released in December of last year. I suffered through heatwaves and the lip service paid by prison officials who claimed to take sufficient steps to protect the women inside. A death like this is tragic and heartbreaking, but I am surprised it didn’t happen sooner.
Inside CCWF we were in an eight-woman cell covered in brick. We weren’t allowed to cover the windows or reduce the heat, but some were allowed a 13-inch fan. There’s only so much cooling that one little fan can do when it gets that hot. In fact, it would get so hot people were kicking and banging on their doors yelling about how hot it was while staff used confiscated fans and sat in their air-conditioned offices.
People make mistakes and serve their time, but they should not be subjected to conditions that amount to a death sentence. To prevent the next tragedy, these conditions must be monitored and there needs to be accountability. Staff quality must also be improved at these facilities, as many don’t view us incarcerated individuals as human; they see them as criminals or are there merely to collect a paycheck.
Most prisons in California lack air conditioning, proper ventilation, and shade structures. As the world faces the dire threat of climate change, temperatures will begin spiking towards extremes across the country, meaning hotter temperatures, brutal winters, and increasingly dangerous conditions for incarcerated persons. In June of this year, California’s workplace safety board approved an indoor heat protection standard and urged Cal/OSHA to put it into effect quickly. While a victory for workers, 100,000 correction workers and detainees laboring in California prisons and jails were exempted from this new standard.
State officials must investigate this recent tragedy and take steps to prevent it from happening in the future. Those steps need to include a process for monitoring extreme temperature and weather threats and ensuring there are plans and safety nets in place in case of an emergency.
No matter the conditions, whether it’s a heatwave, an infectious disease, or a flood, those who are incarcerated deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. As the climate continues to change, the prison environment needs to change with it.
Dangerous conditions in prison are one product of a failing system of mass incarceration. Are we at all surprised that in our current system, where we take away hope and opportunity and put human beings in a concrete box with few opportunities to transform their lives while incarcerated or once they’re released, that nearly two-thirds commit new crimes? To fix this we must dismantle the prison industrial complex and transform the criminal justice system from one of punishment to one of healing and hope. Indeed, I’m a portrait of what’s possible with hope and healing.
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Today I’m a fellow for a program that is making a big difference. It’s called A New Way of Life (ANWOL). Every year, almost 2.5 million women are released from jails and prisons facing countless barriers to reentry. ANWOL works to provide services and support for those exiting prison, ensuring they are set up for success for life outside of incarceration. While recidivism rates across the country hover around 65%, there is a recidivism rate of just 6% among residents of A New Way Of Life’s reentry homes. ANWOL is led by leaders like Susan Burton who is determined to bring these resources to poverty-stricken and over-incarcerated areas, programs that are critical to lowering rates of recidivism and incarceration in communities across the country.
By creating a different approach to keeping our communities safe, these programs provide individuals the opportunity and the support they need to change their lives and become fully functioning members of society. At a time when public safety has become such a hot-button issue, it is critical to divest from prisons and reinvest in programs and organizations that work toward changing laws, policies, and regulations through advocacy and community organizing around criminal justice.
We must unite and demand justice and better treatment for incarcerated persons.
To obtain justice and safer communities, we must also demand that incarcerated persons are given hope and opportunity so they can transform their lives. That serves their interests and the communities they return to, and it’s key to ending a failing system of mass incarceration.
Chasety Reynolds is a fellow for A New Way of Life.