Last week, Democrats including San Antonio-Austin Congressman Greg Casar called on lawmakers to open an investigation into prison conditions in Texas.

At least 41 people have died in the Lone Star State’s unairconditioned prisons due to heat-related or unknown conditions this summer, according to the Texas Tribune.

Even so, it’s hard to firmly establish how many have succumbed to heat-related illness, according to observers. That’s because TDCJ’s official stance is that no inmates have died of heat exhaustion since 2012 — the same year the agency began to be bombarded with wrongful death lawsuits from inmates’ families, the Tribune reports.

    • electriccars@startrek.website
      39·
      1 年前

      Wow! That’s going to save the state of Texas so much money! It’s expensive to house people against their will for enjoying forbidden plants in their own homes. 🙄

    • Sharkwellington@lemmy.one
      13·
      1 年前

      Forty. Freaking. One. Why has this country not been in an uproar since the first one? Why did we wait until this many? This is the first I’ve heard about it. Doesn’t surprise me at all, but I had no idea this was happening.

      Forty one!!

    • LeadSoldier@lemmy.world
      41·
      1 年前

      I agree with you and have studied this from my role as an intelligence official and former interrogator. The lawyer who prosecuted the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials stated that the real problem wasn’t the evil but the apathy of the masses that allowed a few evil people to do big evil things.

      The fact of the matter is that human reactions to certain information are well known from our centuries of study of propaganda and marketing and psychology. At this point it is easy for the government to manipulate messaging so that the people are misled enough to allow evil.

      It is the simple stuff and even smart people are influenced by it over time. It is a well studied phenomenon. No one is immune. For example, Trump saying that he has the most transparent government ever while specifically taking away rights and doing things in secret.

      The propaganda tool has been efficient for our governments, especially since the advent of the internet. Also, keep in mind that roughly half of the population has a two-digit IQ. Some people will never admit that they are dumb and therefore will never admit that they have been deceived.

      The fact that US citizens are scared to stand up to their government because the government police will abuse them shows where we are as a society. We are deeply fascist and the illusion of democracy hasn’t been functioning in Congress for quite a while. The illusion of the checks and balances has worn thin as well.

      So I agree with you. Our society is diseased. But it’s not necessarily the faults of the individuals.

        • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
          5·
          1 年前

          That’s good. That’s progress. Eventually you’ll have no more tears to shed, you’ll grow numb and dead inside, and then, finally, you’ll be able to appreciate the morbid hilarity of humanity’s constant, unflinching torture of humanity.

          We really are the fucking worst 🤣

  • Fisk400@feddit.nu
    48·
    1 年前

    Like with most things under republican control, suffering is the point. They like it when people they don’t like suffers and they will pay money to see it happen. In this case they cause the suffering AND they save money so there is no way it’s getting fixed while Texas is red.

    • skulblaka@kbin.social
      17·
      1 年前

      Texas can’t even provide proper climate control to their regular unincarcerated citizens. The prisons never had a chance.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
        7·
        1 年前

        There’s a difference there. You can justify it under capitalism that unincarcerated people have access to air conditioning if they choose to prioritize it and work for it. Choice is one of the things denied to prisoners. It’s why they theoretically get access to medical care.

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
    43·
    1 年前

    Texans don’t seem to care about hard-working people getting heat-exhaustion to begin with, let alone prisoners.

    • stembolts@programming.dev
      6·
      1 年前

      There is no rule dictating what is and what isn’t a word.

      Language is an ever changing object.

      Was an idea communicated by expressing the sound? It’s a word.

      You didn’t do this, but some people so firmly cling to the idea of rules (which as we have covered, do not exist) that they will feign ignorance at the introduction of an unfamiliar presentation. I find it odd.

      This could lead into a topic about how everything around us, society similarly, has no rules. It’s just a collection of ideas stacked haphazardly, any of it can be changed by any one of us. But I will stop there.

    • Franzia
      3·
      1 年前

      It is super important to communicate to people that it is not normal for prisoners to be struggling in the heat like this.