This article is a copublication with Truthout.
It was an average Tuesday, nearly four in the afternoon, and I was saturated with sweat. Everybody was. All we could do was corral around a stand-up fan and try cooling off. Even the wall-mounted fans didn’t help us stop sweating. Shoot, even the exhaust fan, the one that sounds like a giant vacuum and drowns out our phone calls, didn’t help. Nothing did.
Someone yelled for us to turn on the news. We switched the day room TV to ABC’s local station, and that’s when we saw the report: Eight prisons in Virginia are without air conditioners. One of them is Nottoway Correctional Center. That’s where we are.
This is a daily occurrence for us in the summer: sweating. The kind of sweating that has you skipping lotion because your skin’s already so tacky with perspiration. Shoot, it’s the kind where taking a shower doesn’t help either, because when you step out, you’re sweating again.
On the hottest days, I don’t go outside at all; I have no desire for a close personal kiss from the sun’s rays. Nobody wants to eat, let alone cook. Half the men walk around shirtless, sweat dripping down their spines.
My bunk gets sweaty when I lay it in. The walls sweat, too—you can see it. My celly and I barely speak as we stew in the cell. When we’re locked down for institutional count, we’re in an oven. It’s too hot.
And there’s no relief. After a few days, the fans start blowing dust. The ice machine works overtime. We drink bottles of water to quench our thirst as we sit in front of those dusty fans.
We’re all just trying to stay cool.
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After seeing the news on the facilities without air conditioners, I approached my friend who knew the law. I asked what we could do to bring attention to our plight. He suggested a class-action lawsuit against the Virginia Department of Corrections. That had me interested, but then I peered around me: young men were acting out, laughing as if oblivious to what we were dealing with. I sighed and thanked him for the advice as he wiped sweat from his face with a washcloth.
I sat with another friend who was in prison for a second time, discussing the mindsets of our comrades. He started going into a monologue about his celly stinking up the cell with his multiple uses of their toilet. I tuned him out. I closed my eyes, licked my parched lips, and dreamt of an unexpected blizzard.
My skin was sticky. Sweat trickled down my face as I rose to my feet and headed for the water fountain. I drank the cold water, quenching my thirst . . . but was still hot. I sighed.
It was June 23. The next day, the temperature was predicted to reach 108 degrees. One hundred and eight degrees. In prison, that meant all of us in this facility would be sweating as we struggled through the heat. The mindset would be down in the dumps as we stewed in a congested day room. One hundred and eight degrees.
There are men, too, who don’t own a fan. There are older men who aren’t vocal enough to ask the young men to scoop some ice for them. I always tell them to sit down and let me get them ice for their cups. This heat makes everybody aggressive, unable to think about anybody but themselves as they do whatever they can to cool off. I understand, so I place myself in harm’s way for older men who could be my father. They thank me when I hand them their cups of ice, then they stagger back into their cells, sweating.
We go to sleep in sweat and wake up in sweat twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with no respite until the summertime heat departs for the fall season.
Help us. Please. This is cruel and unusual punishment. Animal control would remove a dog from an owner who left their pet chained outside in this heat. What about us? Aren’t we more than dogs?
Image: Pawel Czerwinski / Unsplash
