SUMMERTIME BLUES

The 4th of July is celebrated by all, even those incarcerated. However, when there is no central air in one's prison facility, celebrations are forgotten as those in a cell do whatever they can to ward off the unbearable heat. During the first week of July, the heat index was one hundred degrees in Virginia, but inside Nottoway Correction Center, it was much higher.

Each housing unit holds 64 incarcerated men, housed in a claustrophobic cell, where they utilized '12 inch fans to cool themselves off. A rule was changed where the Warden afforded them the chance to purchase a second fan. Even so, it's never enough.

When you have 64 men walking around a small enclosure, body heat, along with the sun cooking the concrete, which absorbs heat, the housing unit becomes an oven. As one has seen on YouTube where someone cracks an egg and watches it cook on the hood of a car, the same could be said for those incarcerated men.

The prison officials brought in two stand-up fans to be placed at opposite sides of the dayroom. On top of that, there were three more fans mounted high above the unit to circulate the air. The booth officer even opened the entry doorway to allow air to flow in from the hallway. Now they also accommodated the incarcerated men by leaving their cells' doors cracked during institutional headcount.

The heat was still unprecedented. You had the Peer Mentors checking on the elderly. They delivered ice to their cells, cooked food for them in the microwave and told their neighbors that if they heard pounding on the wall, that was a distress call, and for them to call the booth officer for assistance. Nothing like that transpired, but those inside of those heated cells had to take precautions to keep themselves protected.

The maintenance workers asked the on-duty officers to allow them to lower the temperature of the water when they showered. They did, so for the 4th of July, the incarcerated men took cold showers. This helped them cool off, but some of the elders with health problems couldn't take the freezing temperatures, so to oblige them, the water returned to a degree where all could take a comfortable shower.

This was what Nottoway Correction Center did to help those inside. Still, they walked to the chow hall, where they contended with the outside temperature. The kitchen supervisor gave the men ice cream for dessert. Now with that, they still had a broken ice machine in the chow hall. That, along with the central air being broken, led a lieutenant to feel that the men shouldn't come to the chow hall anymore until it could be fixed. So, the men walked into the chow hall and picked up their tray, then retreated to their housing unit.

In the evening hours, incarcerated men congregated in the dayroom when the power in the cells cut off. Groans and complaints were thrown at the booth officer as the problem took time to fix. Everybody in the unit became selfish as they sat in front of the fans, acting as protectors of it, eyeing others aggressively as they neared them; as if warning them there would be a problem. Fights were always a possibility when the temperatures were high, but nobody fought. Instead, they had a spokesman learn about the issue of the power and what was going on to correct it. The power remained off for over an hour and a half, but before their nightly lockdown, the fans in their cells came back on.

The men locked down for the night. Inside those cells, the heat was merciless. Sleep was on sweat-stained sheets as the men did their best to get those small fans to cool them off. Water intake kept them saturated, but the heat reminded some of being nuked like a burrito during a two-minute duration in a microwave, but instead, those men contended with the heat from 8:45 PM until 7:15 AM. Too many hours of misery, in an era where American households had 90 percent of their homes with air conditioners, but there were still prisons without them.

The cruelty would get PETA to step up and remove a poodle from a home, but those incarcerated are suffering too. The prison system has tried all they can with a limited budget, but in truth, when it's all said and done, the time for an upgrade is a must.