What is the Problem with High Prison Temperatures? From the Threat to Health to the Right to Comfort

In recent years, extreme heat in United States (US) jails and prisons has become a contested political issue. This article takes high prison temperatures, and prisoners’ demands for air-conditioning, as a case to reconsider established ways of thinking about the prison and punishment. Most advocates of air-conditioning focus on the health risks of exposure to extreme heat. This article, alternatively, identifies two limitations of such health-based approaches. First, they re-legitimize a standard of “humane treatment” that allows significant suffering short of a threat to health. Second, they avoid the public’s ambivalence about the suffering of incarcerated people. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Lisa Guenther, I develop an alternative line of critique: problematizing the prison. Problematization seeks to illuminate the logics that channel our thinking in order to unsettle them. I argue that in the present political moment, considering prisoners’ right to comfort can have such an unsettling effect and activate intolerance of the prison.