Prison Heat: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

our main story tonight concerns the fact that summer's here it's been getting hotter and hotter outside so we thought why not take a break and have some summer fun we're allowed to have some summer fun right so tonight we're going to talk about popsicles there are tons of them in america and when they get too hot it can be a real problem sorry did i say popsicles i meant prisons we're going to talk about prisons there are tons of them in america and when they get too hot it can be a real problem don't act surprised you knew no fun was happening here you remember what our summer fun episode was this time last year voting by mail don't be mad at me be mad at yourself you chose to be here and look the fact is heat imprisons is a big problem we've talked repeatedly on this show about the injustices of mass incarceration and how little society seems to care and a pretty good example of that is the fact that in some of the hottest areas of the country these states over half the prisons lack air conditioning in their housing areas and in texas that's the case in nearly 75 of their prisons and that is not good because in summer the heat index inside of them can hit 150 degrees plus there is a growing population of older prisoners whose age makes them more susceptible to the heat and over 40 percent of incarcerated people have a chronic medical condition raising the risk of heat stroke so a lot of them worry about what happens when the weather turns hot i have heart disease high blood pressure diabetes that's three conditions that even tdc admits could make a person susceptible to extreme heat conditions so my heart has to work a whole lot harder than the average guy just to try to cool my body down and as a result i suffer from extreme chest pains on days where it's extremely hot i get sick real fast that is remarkably dangerous and i would argue that the only time getting murdered by the heat is acceptable is if you've committed the crime of being a lobster but unless you happen to be a tasty sea weirdo with edible arms and a pile of scrumptious ass meats that pairs beautifully with melted butter i'm going to say that that is very wrong and physical conditions are just one part of this prisons also house an increasing number of people with mental health concerns who require medications that can compromise their body's ability to regulate temperature so many avoid taking their medications when it's hot which may explain why there is an increase in the frequency of suicide watches and self-harm behaviors during the summer months this situation is so bad the un committee against torture has expressed particular concern about deaths from extreme heat exposure in prison facilities in texas and while you probably assumed texas prisons were bad maybe not international human rights watch list bad and just to get this out of the way right at the start if anyone is thinking well come on it's prison these criminals should not be comfortable first you they're human beings who i would argue deserve humane treatment regardless of what they did but even if you are fully on board with our current system of punitive justice on a ridiculous scale you should know even some of those upholding this system find the current situation indefensible just listen to the former head of one correctional officers union you know i don't have love for these people we're not trying to make this uh lush and uh we're trying to make it humane these are third world conditions we're supposed to run prisons not concentration camps these are institutions for incarceration the incarceration is their punishment not not cooking them to death right and just take a moment to absorb the sentence we're supposed to run prisons not concentration camps if someone helping to run a system is comparing it to a concentration camp things have gotten way out of hand if someone said we're supposed to run a quiznos not a concentration camp you would seriously question what the is going on at that quiznos so tonight let's talk about heat in prisons let's start with the obvious question here if prisons are too hot which many clearly are why not put in air conditioning and that does seem like a pretty easy fix but whenever it's brought up lawmakers and prison officials have claimed they simply cannot afford it although when making that argument they've occasionally been slightly more honest than they were perhaps planning to be like when this texas state senator appeared on local radio you know we can talk about this all late it's not going to change the prisons are hot they're uncomfortable and the real solution is don't commit a crime and you stay at home and be cool we're not going to air condition them one we don't want to number two we couldn't afford it if we wanted to well hold on there let's back up to number one shall we we don't want to because after you say that it doesn't really matter what you say next if people don't care about fixing a problem they're just not going to fix it however simple the solution is it's why your software update still interrupts you every single day sure you could just click on the alert and follow the basic steps to make the updates but have you done that of course not why because you could not give one single solitary and it seems that texas in particular really doesn't want to put in air conditioning it actually spent seven million dollars on a lawsuit to fight installing ac in one prison's housing area despite the fact the estimated cost of installation was only around four million and they've also thrown around some suspiciously high estimates they once claimed that it would cost 109 million dollars to install ac in a unit for developmentally disabled prisoners even though the entire housing unit cost just 26 million to build and look i admit i don't know much about ac installation if you pointed at a random building and said it cost ten thousand dollars to install ac in there i'd say okay sure and if you pointed another one and said it cost three million dollars to install it in there i'd say yeah makes sense but if you pointed at the building and said it cost four times the price of that building to install ac in it i'd say i think you somehow know less about air conditioning than i do and that too expensive argument gets even harder to take when you consider that in some prisons there is climate control just not for the prisoners because some have ac in staff offices and then there is this two years ago prison officials spent more than seven hundred thousand dollars on new climate-controlled housing facilities for prisoners no for the prisons in-house pig farms officials say the cooling systems are quote consistent with any swine operation look i'm not against pigs getting treated comfortably i love pigs they're springy tails they're too big ears their stupid flat noses and their horrible eyes pigs are like big chubby dogs you can eat at christmas i just question prioritizing their comfort over humans and the thing is correction systems do seem to acknowledge that they have a problem with heat it's just they often try to treat it with ridiculous half measures the texas prison system even produced this video on what staff should do when they see someone about to pass out from heat exhaustion if conscious and alert have the person drink water or a rehydrating sports drink do not give them caffeinated drinks as these will contribute to further dehydration sprinkle or spray them with water and apply cool water or wet cloths to the person's neck armpits and groin fan the person if there is no breeze okay flicking water in their face and fanning them with a clipboard is just not going to cut it and at that point it makes basically just as much sense to recommend lick the person sweat off their forehead or rub them with a dvd of captain phillips sure it's technically a gesture but it's not going to do much the problem is when prisons use things like large fans and water misters they only help to a certain threshold of heat and beyond it they can actually make things worse water misters increase humidity and the cdc has explicitly said that it does not recommend the use of fans above a 95 degree heat index as they actually increase heat stress by blowing air that is warmer than the body's temperature and dangerous situations get compounded by the fact that when heat related issues occur prisons can show very little urgency in addressing them take what happened to larry mccullum he was serving an 11-month sentence for cashing a bad check and began showing symptoms of heat stroke but prison employees didn't call ems until over 40 minutes after he was found convulsing when mccullum finally arrived at the hospital his body temperature was 109 degrees and he died days later and when that prison's warden was questioned about the delay in medical treatment this was his ridiculous response if you were at home and your wife was having a heart attack and you called 911 and it took a half hour for them to arrive would you have a problem with that that's speculating i don't know i wouldn't know if she had a heart attack or not okay i would have a problem with that just letting you know okay if my wife was having a heart attack and i called 9-1-1 and it took a half hour for an ambulance to arrive you you don't feel comfortable saying that that you two would would have an issue with that i would not i would have to figure out whether it's a heart attack or not okay it'd be just bad chili what the first no one would ever confuse someone having violent convulsions with having bad chili second bad chili has a name and it's called hormel show some respect to that kind of bean nightmares and finally guessing your wife's heart attack might be just bad chili is a terrible answer not only because that's not how heart attacks work it's also not how hypotheticals work in this scenario your wife is having a heart attack you can't just ignore the premise if someone asks if you could have dinner with anyone living or dead who would you choose you're not allowed to say no thanks i already ate that's not the point of the question and amazingly as bad as that response was it wasn't even the worst moment in his deposition because months later he was asked about how the population of his prison might be more susceptible to heat related illnesses and just watch this infuriating exchange do you suspect that some of the people that come into your facility are going to have hypertension i do not know do you suspect some of the people that come into your facility are going to be i don't know older than 60 i do not know do you suspect that some of the people who come into your facility are going to be older than 40 i do not know do you suspect that some of the people that are going to come into your facility are going to be on psychotropic medications i do not know wouldn't any competent supervisor uh shouldn't he or she know the answers to those questions i do not know okay we get it you don't know a lot of things i almost wish that line of questioning had continued do you suspect that some of the people who come into your facilities are fine mutants powered by heat i do not know do you have a tattoo of peppa pig on your lower back i do not know if you're sure no one would ever find out would you have consensual sex with a dolphin i do not know would you hit bruce willis with your car if given the opportunity i do not know what you think responding with i do not know to every question asked of a person makes them sound like a total i do not know so look when you put all of this together prisoners in this country are desperately uncomfortable and sometimes dying due to the heat and no one seems to give enough of a to do anything about it and while a lot of the facilities that i've shown you tonight have been in texas that is not because it's the only culprit it's just one of the only states where this story has been extensively reported on camera but you can find accounts of similar problems in places like louisiana and in alabama and in florida and in michigan and in virginia this is a deadly situation and it's only going to get worse especially as summers are getting hotter and hotter and while this is clearly just one small part of a much larger discussion about whether and how prisons should exist in this country until such time as we have that discussion there's actually an easy solution to this one problem and that is prisons need air conditioning so put air conditioning in that's it i know this show has trained you to anticipate nuance but this one is really pretty straightforward we shouldn't be cooking prisoners to death the end that's just not something we should be allowing under any circumstances because locking human beings in rooms with a heat index of 150 degrees begs the question how on earth could anyone anywhere think that it's okay to do that and to borrow the go-to answer of an extremely weird extremely cruel man i do not know you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 2,721,389

Rating: 4.8735642 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 6fiRDJLjL94

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/PM_me_no_clothes_pic]

USA: puts prisoners into ovens rampant with disease and sexual violence for sometimes decades

Prisoners: don't get rehabilitated and go back to committing crime after release

USA: surprised pikachu face

[u/MySockHurts]

Stealing this top comment from YouTube:

A lot of problems with our current system of incarceration wouldn’t exist if we viewed and developed prisons as centres for rehabilitation and not garbage cans for humans to be thrown in.

And that goes for you too, Reddit. Try remembering that every time you make a comment about your favorite baddie along the lines of "Lock him up!" and "Can't wait for this sick fuck to rot and die in prison."

[u/SurvivingBigBrother]

Some Sheriffs literally boast about how "hard and tough" their jails are...Like that is a good thing. Jail or Prison is simply somewhere to keep the inmates. It is not supposed to be purposefully awful.

[u/Scrumshiz]

The warden in that deposition who oversaw McCollum's prison succumbed to a brain tumor two years ago.

Did he deserve it? I do not know.

[u/HisCricket]

6 x 9 cell in Texas no AC. Yeah prison in Texas in the summer is straight up hell.

[u/HyphenSam]

If anyone is thinking "Come on, it's prison. These prisoners should not be comfortable", firstly: fuck you.

Based John Oliver.

[u/CHAZ_prime_minister]

"Prison Heat" sounds like the worst kind of porn

[u/PM-ME-BATMAN]

That full Bryce Mitchell commercial

The drill story