Six inmate plaintiffs in a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state prison system argued that more than 1,400 inmates, many elderly and infirm, are suffering “cruel and unusual punishment,” a violation the Eighth Amendment, by not having access to air conditioning, according to the Houston Chronicle.

US District Judge Keith Ellison held a hearing on the lawsuit on Wednesday, and gave the state 30 days to comply, AP reported.

The lawsuit, which was filed in 2013, contends that 13 inmates have died of heat-related deaths since 2007, including 11 in 2011, when a heatwave brought some of the hottest temperatures on record.

Daily measurements taken by the National Weather Service show that, since the beginning of the summer in 2016, the peak heat index has averaged 104 degrees, NPR reported.

The prison’s cell blocks are poorly ventilated, steel and concrete blocks, the inmates said. To make matters worse, the Wallace Pack Unit sits on humid pasturelands between Austin and Houston.

“A lot of times it gets so hot in our dorms that we have to strip down to our boxers, and we’ll just lay on the floor because it’s a little bit cooler on the floor than it is trying to sit up in our bunks,” plaintiff Keith Cole, 62, who is serving life for murder, told NPR. “We try to stay in front of our fans. But in reality, there’s really not too much that we can really do in our living areas to alleviate the heat.”

Cole suffers from heart disease, diabetes and hypertension, and there are a lot of older prisoners like him in the prison.

“My age, with the medical conditions that I have, the medications that I am on, extreme heat can kill me,” he said. “So, it’s not a comfort issue with me. It has nothing to do with that. This is a serious medical issue.”

Autopsies reveal that, since 1998, 20 inmates have died from heatstroke or hyperthermia in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, plaintiffs’ lawyers said.

There are probably more, inmates said, but the cause of death is often listed as heart attack.

There are 109 state prison facilities in Texas, with 30 only that are air-conditioned in all housing areas. Facilities have balked at the expense of outfitting all their prisons with air conditions, and have said that retrofitting the Pack Unit alone would cost $22 million.

From Alabama to Michigan to Texas, despite the isolation of prisons and a desire to cover-up news of the work stoppages by correctional departments, reports are leaking of widespread disruption at prisons.

The nationwide prison strike began September 9, when inmates refused to report for their prison jobs. It is becoming the largest prison strike in US history.

CALIFORNIA

In California, at least 150 inmates are confirmed to be on strike in the John Latorraca Correctional Facility and Merced County Sheriff Jail. They are demanding better conditions, a lieutenant to be ousted and an end to solitary confinement. Inmates have been threatened with guns and dogs.

“Initially with the strike, they refused all consumption of food and all movement. They had boycotted court, their yard time, their visitation, all medical movement until something is changed,” Victoria Castillo, an organizer with Live Free Merced, told RT. “We had all sort of problems with inmates not properly triaged or being triaged and cleared from prison and then having to have extensive surgery for cancers and underlying medical conditions that were potentially life threatening as well as improper mental health evaluations.”

Castillo said that at the John Latorraca facility, there were “suicides every 60 to 90 days.”

There are additional reports that the largest women’s prison in the state, Central California Women’s prison in Chowchilla, is also on an all-out strike.

Azzurra Crispino, organizer with the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, told RT that while the mainstream media is not covering the strikes, there are many grassroots organizations working inside and outside over the major goal to reform prison conditions and strive for a prisoners’ union.

“It is important to talk about why we want a prisoners’ union and a fair minimum wage or a fair wage for prisoners. It is not just to better their conditions and give them a little nest-egg when they come out of prison and reduce recidivism, but also the recognition that the system of mass incarceration in the United States in only possible, because it exploits these captive workers,” Crispino told RT. “Unionizing prisoners, which is why the Industrial Workers of the World is involved, is a strategy towards prison abolition and an end to prison slavery.”

Crispino said there are private and public companies that benefit from the labor prison industry.

“McDonald’s, Starbucks, AT&T, Verizon, Victoria Secret, United Airlines. It is a long list of companies that use prison labor for pennies to the hour, if at all any wage, and are benefiting from this monetarily,” Crispino added.

Crispino said inmates have been threatened with retaliation in the form of solitary confinement, and long-term solitary confinement.

“In California at Merced, the inmates were threatened with dogs, rubber bullets and pepper spray,” Crispino told RT. “We have seen a decrease in food quality to the prisoners. In South Carolina, there have been reports of maggots in the food. Lockdowns have been widespread.”

FLORIDA

In Florida, protests erupted in four facilities in the north of the state.

At the Holmes Correctional Institution, a major disturbance happened on September 7, with several hundred inmates housed in multiple dorms for 24 hours. Visitations were canceled, and lockdown continued through the weekend.

At the Mayo Correctional Institution, two dorms were involved in work stoppage and disturbances on September 9 and 10. The institution was placed on lockdown. No injuries were reported, but again, visitation was canceled and lockdown continued through the weekend.

The Florida Department of Corrections said several inmates identified in the disturbances were transferred to other prisons. They also said the strikes would be investigated.

“More than 24,000 prisoners missed work. The facilities experiencing full shutdowns that we know about hold approximately 24,000 prisoners,” said Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee in a statement last week. “There are probably thousands more who didn’t work that we don’t know about, yet. Many are still not working today and intend to continue the strike until their demands are satisfied or the prisons break under the economic strain of operating without their slaves.”

ALABAMA, MICHIGAN, SOUTH CAROLINA

In Alabama’s Holman Prison, inmates went on a full strike and refused to report for their jobs on September 9. Also at Atmore, inmates did not report for work for a day.

In Michigan, prisoners at the Kinross Correctional Facility refused to report for kitchen work, forcing correctional officers to provide bagged food for lunch and breakfast the next day, according to Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Chris Gautz.

Four hundred prisoners marched peacefully in the yard for several hours when a common room was damaged, and the facility was put on lockdown. Gautz said 150 prisoners who were considered strike organizers are being transferred to other prisons in the state.

There were also strikes in Indiana and Iowa, a hunger strike at Ohio State Penitentiary and SOCF in Lucasville, Ohio, and possibly at least half a dozen strikes in Texas.

The nationwide strike launch on September 9 also marked the 45th anniversary of the 1971 Attica Prison riot, when 1,300 men demanded an end to slave labor, an end to law enforcement brutality and fair visitations rights. The strike lasted four days before law enforcement raided the prison, killing 39 inmates and guards, leaving 128 men injured. Afterward, prisoners who survived the shooting were then tortured.

“For every dollar in corrections spending, there’s another 10 dollars of other types of costs to families, children and communities that nobody sees because it doesn’t end up on a state budget,” Michael McLaughlin, a doctoral student and certified public accountant, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

McLaughlin is the lead researcher for “The Economic Burden of Incarceration in the US,” a study recently conducted by Washington University in St. Louis. Along with a team of researchers, he and Carrie Pettus-Davis, a co-director for the Smart Decarceration Initiative and director of the Concordance Institute for Advancing Social Justice, both Washington University-based, determined that the “annual economic burden” of US incarceration is an estimated $1.2 trillion, according to The Source, a Washington University publication.

The $1.2 trillion figure is nearly 6 percent of GDP and is 11 times the cost of what governments pay for corrections, the study reports, based on 22 costs from three categories: “costs of corrections,” “costs borne by incarcerated persons,” and “costs borne by families, children, and communities.”

Aside from the $91.1 billion spent by governments on corrections, the “societal” expenditures are being totaled for the first time, the study authors claim.

Inmates miss out on about $70.5 billion in wages every year while behind bars, and in their lifetimes, they are likely to give up $230 billion, due to employment restrictions and discrimination, the researchers concluded.

The largest drain on the economy from incarceration, the study found, comes from criminogenic forces inherent in the system itself. Criminal behavior that is learned or mastered inside prisons goes on to harm the community the ex-convict returns to, costing some $285.8 billion each year.

“We’re getting to a point in the U.S., in society, that we’ve incarcerated so many people that it’s kind of become a common thing in some communities,” McLaughlin told the Post-Dispatch.

People who have never been to jail are 18 to 25 times less likely to commit a crime than those who have previously been behind bars, Pettus-Davis told the St. Louis newspaper.

Imprisonment becomes so common that other social cues or deterrents are rendered useless or no longer exist in some communities, they say.

The cost to families is wide-ranging, from adverse health-related effects costing $10.2 billion to decreased property values costing $11 billion, or the increased risk of divorce, which costs $17.7 billion.

The most vulnerable relatives of the incarcerated, their children, pay more than their fair share in social costs. According to the study, they are five times more likely to end up in jail or prison and earn less income and education, a total loss of $166.6 billion.

While the study did not consider any benefits of imprisonment, the study authors told the Post-Dispatch, “there is a point where the marginal cost of incarcerating an additional individual exceeds the marginal benefit.”

“If anything, we believe our study underestimates the true cost of incarceration,” McLaughlin added, alluding to incalculable costs such as negative emotional health.