An Arkansas summer that has been hot at times, although not nearly the inferno that has been recorded in some previous years, took a toll on state prison air conditioners.
According to records of invoices provided by the state Department of Correction, repairs and replacement parts for the department's heating, ventilation and air-conditioning units cost $56,484 in the first two months of summer -- June and July.
Cooling systems needed repairs at nine prisons, the records show. The department says no prisoners went completely without air conditioning because of the malfunctions, but several inmates complained about sweltering conditions in their barracks.
Unlike some other Southern states, such as Louisiana and Texas, air conditioning is near-universal in Arkansas prisons, where 96 percent of the state's 16,040 prison beds are located in directly air-conditioned facilities. For the remaining 566 beds, cooled air is circulated in from other buildings, department spokesman Solomon Graves said.
Arkansas' 24 prisons are located in all corners in the state, but most are around the department's Pine Bluff headquarters and in the Delta, where temperatures average a few degrees higher than in other parts of the state. Temperatures across the state in June and July this year were higher than in previous years, according to the Southern Regional Climate Center.
During the summer, Department of Correction standards call for housing temperatures to be kept between 74 degrees and 78 degrees, Graves said.
Keeping up with that demand taxes the systems, said Gail Mainard, the assistant director for construction and maintenance for the Department of Correction.
"The air-conditioning systems start in midspring or so, and when the heat gets up there, the systems start breaking," Mainard said. "It's an annual event."
According to state transparency records, the Department of Correction paid its two largest heating-and-air-conditioning suppliers -- R&E Supply and Trane -- more than $360,000 in the previous fiscal year. Those two companies were among the top five suppliers for overall prison facility maintenance in each of the past four years.
The problem is often exacerbated, Mainard said, by the prisons themselves, where thick, concrete walls are built for security, not energy efficiency. Some of the state's prisons are approaching 100 years old, and some barracks have metal roofs. Many of the lockups are designed to hold between 25 and 50 inmates in an open room.
The heating-and-air-conditioning invoices were requested by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette after several prison inmates and their families contacted the newspaper to complain that prisoners were being kept in barracks with broken air-conditioning units.
According to the invoices, problems with air-conditioning systems were recorded in at least nine prisons. Those lockups and the cost of repairs were:
• Pine Bluff Unit: $67
• Tucker Unit: $13,074
• Cummins Unit: $4,714
• Ouachita River Unit: $6,401
• Benton Unit: $2,558
• Northwest Arkansas Work Release Center: $728
• Grimes and McPherson units: $14,451
• Calico Rock unit: $2,982
An additional $11,509 was billed to the Department of Correction in Pine Bluff. Those invoices did not specify a shipping address. Graves said some of those parts may have been shipped to central maintenance facilities and distributed to prisons.
At the McPherson women's prison in Newport, repairs were needed when the cooling system atop at least one barrack malfunctioned, as the early July temperatures reached into the 90s.
Invoice records show that a 20-ton, $10,000 unit was ordered for that lockup on June 30, with a delivery date of July 30. Other parts were sent to the nearby Grimes unit that month.
In a different instance, two male prisoners who are enrolled in the substance-abuse program at the Randall L. Williams prison in Pine Bluff wrote to the newspaper complaining that the air conditioning had been out in their barracks for more than two months.
None of the department invoices showed replacement parts being shipped directly to that unit, although Graves said the department made six purchases in June and July totaling $20,792.
Judy Hutchinson, the aunt of an inmate at that prison, confirmed that the air conditioning was working in late July, after the family sent repeated requests for repairs to Department of Correction officials.
"When the air went out in May, it was a long time to get it fixed," Hutchinson said.
In a letter to the Democrat-Gazette, Hutchinson's nephew, Robert Worthington, said the barracks where he was housed were being cooled with shop fans in July as the heat index outside rose above 100 degrees.
"We are all miserable and have been since May," Worthington wrote. "It's hard to breath, easy to overheat, unhealthy and smells like mold and mildew."
Graves said the cooling units for Worthington's barracks never completely stopped functioning, but were running on half power. In response to an inquiry about each of the repair requests at the nine prisons, Graves noted multiple instances where a unit ran on one compressor while another was being replaced.
Graves and Mainard said they were not aware of any instances where prisoners were completely without cooling systems this summer.
When the systems fail to keep the barracks within the normal temperature range, Graves said, wardens can do such things as move in fans for cooling or require prisoners to shower elsewhere to keep down the humidity. No prisoners have reported falling ill because of the heat in their barracks, Graves said.
The lack of air conditioning in prisons for Arkansas' neighbors to the south and west has been a point of contention. Inmates and human-rights advocates have argued that sweltering conditions can be unconstitutional, especially in places where the heat index regularly tops 100 degrees.
Three prisoners on Louisiana's death row have sued the state over the lack of air conditioning in their unit at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. In Texas, newspapers have reported that less than a third of prisons are air conditioned, and extreme heat has been linked to multiple deaths.
Graves said he did not know when the Arkansas Correction Department began cooling lockups in the summers. Mainard said the department started equipping new buildings with air conditioning in the 1970s.
Metro on 08/21/2016