The Hidden Punishment of HVAC in Prison
“Some like it hot and some sweat when the heat is on / Some feel the heat and decide that they can’t go on”
— “Some Like It Hot,” The Power Station (1985)
Summer has always been my favorite season in Maine. Fall is a close second, with its crispy edged warmth that signals football time is here, but there’s nothing quite like the feel of a salty breeze that’s just cool enough to take the weight off a sun-soaked afternoon. The delight of moments like those is only heightened when the sky darkens and dumps a few buckets of warm water on your head.
My Jamaican side can’t get enough of a hot Maine summer. But the dysfunctional HVAC and incessant lock-ins at Maine State Prison are making this summer oppressive and depleting, which also makes me concerned for our older residents.
Dirty recycled air is among at least a dozen health-eroding aspects of daily prison life that are commonly overlooked. In my early years, I brushed off the newly developed eye irritation and frequent morning nosebleeds as part of my new normal, a couple minor irritants I needed to learn to live with. I considered the older men’s complaints about the poor air quality “old man problems.” The significance of the fact that in winter, we had air conditioning and cold shower water, and in summer, hot air and hotter water, was lost on me.
Now, after 17 winters and 18 summers, I have become one of the “old heads” complaining about the air quality and the HVAC system that works in reverse.
After giving my coat away, nine years ago, to someone who needed it more, I conditioned myself to endure the coldest Maine winter nights without one. Even with this tolerance, this past winter I did something I had never needed to do: I slept in a full sweatsuit and winter hat for half the season.
Men young and old were devising ways to keep the cold from reaching their bones. One skilled seamster made a pair of slippers out of sweatshirt material to protect his feet from the bitter concrete floor. Another man elected to sleep with his shoes on. An elderly man I know took special care to warm the vagus nerve at the base of his skull, covering the sweatshirt wrapped around his neck with his prayer rug. Every time the cell doors opened after a lock-in period, the dayroom filled with grown men shivering like children who didn’t listen to mom when she said to dress warm.
Then came this summer.
You know it’s hot inside when you have to go outside on an 80-degree day to cool off. Day after day, week after week, incarcerated people here suffer sleep deprivation due to these conditions. We awake dripping sweat, chests heavy with the weight of muggy recycled air. The concrete walls and floors sweat with us, seeking relief that never comes. The heavy, wet air we breathe is sucked out of our cells through a six-by-six-inch square of holes in the wall and then pushed right back in — from someone else’s cell — after passing through air filters that may have been cleaned once in the past 15 years.
As corrosive to health and wellness as these conditions are, they are made worse when you factor in the average number of hours spent in-cell. According to the schedule posted in the 2024 edition of the Maine State Prison Handbook provided to everyone confined here, prisoners should spend just over 11 hours per day in our cells. We should be out of our cells for more than 12.5 hours every day for education, rehabilitative programming, and prosocial recreation.
Instead, on the best of days, we’ll get eight-and-a-half hours out. On the worst of days, we get one. On average, we spend between four-and-a-half and seven hours outside the confines of our six-and-a-half-by-fourteen-foot concrete cages. That means, regardless of age or (ill)health, we spend an average of 17 to 19.5 hours locked in our cells. Most of us share this tiny toilet space with another human being, increasing the heat, dust and discomfort of the experience.
Prisons were not designed for comfort, health or wellness. The fact that prisons were designed solely to punish people is an inescapable fact also made visceral by the structure and (dys)function of the buildings that contain us. When humans are forced to live for decades in a cage, they develop physical, mental, emotional and social problems that only worsen any such problems they may have had when they were sentenced. In Maine, due to lack of parole, those serving such long sentences are then either straight-released or released on probation without adequate support.
Prison is not a viable solution to social problems. Someday, Maine will wake up and stop meeting harm with more harm, but rather with support for healing and the transformation of troubled lives. It’s incredibly difficult to focus on education, rehabilitation or developing healthy social behaviors when you’re either too hot or too cold to think.
Leo Hylton is a PhD student at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, currently incarcerated at Maine State Prison. His education and work are focused on Social Justice Advocacy and Activism, with a vision toward an abolitionist future. You can reach him at: Leo Hylton #70199, 807 Cushing Rd., Warren, ME 04864, or leoshininglightonhumanity@gmail.com.
