By Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg,
August 29, 2024
Source: The Appeal
Photo Source: Unsplash,
This story was produced by The Appeal and co-published with Grist.
“It’s too hot,” the nurse said, according to Ehlers. “I’m not going up there. Tell him to come down here.”
Broadway was “holding his neck, gasping for breath,” said Ehlers. An officer radioed that Broadway couldn’t walk. By the time the nurse entered his cell, he had already lost consciousness, said Ehlers. She administered Narcan, and officers began chest compressions. Ehlers yelled out repeatedly that Broadway had asthma and did not use drugs.
The stretcher was broken, so Mark used his bed sheet to carry Broadway down five flights of stairs with the assistance of three staff members. Broadway was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
At the time of his death, Broadway was 51 years old. While incarcerated, he battled cancer, wrote a novel, and earned his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. An IDOC spokesperson said in an email that an investigation is ongoing.
“Mike was really special and he deserved better than to die from something so easily avoidable,” Ehlers wrote to The Appeal.
As summers get hotter, conditions are becoming increasingly dangerous for the more than 1 million people locked up in state prisons, most of which do not have universal air conditioning. Even prisons in some of the hottest states, like Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia, are only partially air-conditioned, according to a survey of state corrections agencies conducted by The Appeal. For the six states that did not respond to the survey — Florida, Tennessee, Michigan, Nevada, Kansas, and West Virginia — we gathered information from news reports, including local reporting and a USA Today analysis of prison air conditioning published in 2022. According to our investigation:
Just over 80 percent of federal prisons have universal air conditioning.
Only five states provide air conditioning in all prison housing units.
In 22 states, most people are housed in air-conditioned units, which means more than 50 percent of state prisoners live in air-conditioned housing units;
In 17 states, some prison housing units are air-conditioned across multiple facilities.
In five states, few housing units are air-conditioned — only a single facility and/or specialized units, like infirmaries, are cooled.
Only one state, Alaska, has no air-conditioned housing units.
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