What summer heat waves mean for prisons

Make Me Smart June 5, 2024 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

All right. I’m ready. Hey everyone, I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.

Kimberly Adams 

Dragged that out for a bit. And I’m Kimberly Adams. Thank you for joining us on this Wednesday, June the fifth. Today we are going to do some news and some smiles. So, Kai, what caught your attention today?

Kai Ryssdal 

I have been for many years and continue to be simply gobsmacked at the amount of control that the state of New York has over transportation in the city of New York in virtually every degree, right? They control the subway system, the MTA, which has subways and buses and bridges and all kinds of stuff. And now comes news out of Albany, that literally weeks before a change that people have been working on for decades, that would implement congestion pricing in parts of Manhattan, arguably one of the worst traffic zones on the planet, except maybe Cairo, Egypt, where I honestly thought I was going to die in the back of a taxi cab. But that’s a whole different thing. Right?

Kimberly Adams

You know I rode a motorcycle there.

Kai Ryssdal

Yeah, I know you did. I know. I know. I’m amazed you’re alive, honestly. Anyway. So, Governor Kathy Hochul has come out after previously being in favor of congestion pricing. She now says, oh no, no, now’s not the time. And literally people have been working on this for decades. And it’s supposed to go into effect, I think the end of this month, and now it’s like, I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s amazeballs. It’s simply amazing. I encourage you to read the piece in the New York Times about it. There are competing interests here on who ought to be taxed, who’s going to pay it, whether you tax commuters or the drivers or businesses? The politics of it. I just, I don’t know. It’s bewildering to me. And look, I mean, New York City is an economic engine, arguably the key economic engine of this entire economy. And holy cow, they’re just screwing around. It’s wild.

Kimberly Adams 

I cannot wait to see whatever fundraising disclosures come out around this time period because I am sure that we will see a giant influx of donations and funding and lobbying. I’m not sure what the disclosure laws are around that in New York state. But I’ll bet there will be some interesting money data around this time period once that stuff gets disclosed of what led to this particular decision at this particular moment.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, it’s wild. Wild. Wild. Wild.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. I’m in New York at the moment and will be here for a couple of weeks, and I have been experiencing the traffic. And I was lucky enough to go to Broadway last night with my mom and my sister and my nieces and nephews.

Kai Ryssdal

What’d you see?

Kimberly Adams

I saw The Wiz. It was fantastic. So good. But it was only maybe about a mile from the bureau. And so, I was like, I’m just gonna walk it. And I for sure made it faster than the cars because I was regularly moving far beyond the cars going alongside of me. It was wild. I was just like, ooh, thank goodness, I didn’t take an Uber because that would have been incredibly pricey. Plus, very slow.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. Amazing. What do you got?

Kimberly Adams 

Hot weather. Although it’s pretty comfortable here in New York at the moment, a lot of the country is experiencing a really bad heat wave. We are going to be having more heat waves. Looking at the Washington Post. Brutal heat wave to break records in the western US through Friday. It’s sweeping across California, Arizona, Texas, and the rest of the Southwest US with record temperatures. Look, this is climate change. It’s going to continue to get worse, which has a lot of infrastructure consequences, as we’ve talked about. And this heat is very dangerous, especially for the elderly, especially for low income folks. But also, and as is highlighted in an article in Politico, in the prison system. The headline here: “‘Cooking someone to death’: Southern states resist calls to add air conditioning to prisons. Advocates have called the sweltering conditions in some prisons, ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment.” And it goes on to talk about how all of these efforts to install air conditioning in prisons in these places like Texas and Louisiana and Alabama, where it gets extraordinarily hot in the summer are getting struck down by state legislatures that are like yeah, you’re in prison. It’s not supposed to be comfortable. But prisoners are dying of the heat in these places. They are in some cases, one prisoner sued, saying that it was cruel and unusual punishment to keep them in places that are 110, 120 degrees inside, and that some prisoners are drinking toilet water to try to cool themselves off. Or laying, trying to lay on the concrete floors when the guards aren’t looking because the guards don’t allow them to lie on the floor, but the floor is the only place that’s cool. Some of the guards and prison corrections officers unions are complaining because they’re saying the extreme heat makes everyone more irritable and hostile, which can increase violence in the prisons and it’s making it harder to recruit and retain corrections officers, which also makes the facilities more dangerous. And like, this idea that, you know, people in prison should be punished is fueling a lot of this lack of empathy for what is real, real suffering. Some states are, you know, doing it, but the cost of updating many of these facilities is in the billions of dollars, or hundreds of millions, at least. And states, you know, when they’re trying to make decisions about where to allocate those dollars, it’s a little bit hard for them, I guess, to argue to their constituency or to their colleagues that money needs to be going for folks in prison, but they are also human beings.

Kai Ryssdal

Yeah. For sure. For sure.

Kimberly Adams

It was a pretty grim story, but I would highly recommend folks read it, especially if you live in a state where you know, you’re experiencing one of these heat waves. Like, go look. See what folks who are incarcerated are living and dealing with, you know? Because you can’t go to a cooling center when you’re locked into that. Yeah. So, that’s what I got.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. Well, shall we?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah.

Kai Ryssdal

What do you got?

Kimberly Adams

I am very cautious about bringing as my Make Me Smiles these sort of social media influencers helping out the less fortunate type stories. Or the oh, someone did a GoFundMe for a homeless person. And you know, yay, look at that. Because A, I think that it reveals sort of just deep systemic flaws that, you know, should not need GoFundMe’s to solve. And also, a lot of times people are doing this stuff, you know, for the clicks for the social media clout. And I don’t like exploiting somebody’s misfortune for, you know, somebody else’s financial game. So, that caveat said, I like this story anyway because I think that this person is still doing good and not doing it in a exploitative way. So, this is a story in CNN. And the headline is, “This 27-year-old keeps taking day laborers to Disneyland,” right? And “one thing always catches his attention.” Too long, don’t read. It is the pure joy in people’s faces. This guy goes to places around California, and will like roll into a Home Depot where there are like day laborers or places where people gather to do like a day rate housekeeping work or other types of jobs like that, and basically pays people a day’s wage, and takes them on a mini-vacation, and takes them to Disneyland, or takes them, you know, to a pool or just does something nice for them. And what really struck me about this is how many of these folks said that, you know, they never had a day off. They never got to take time off. And he said originally, you know, he started giving people money and asking them to take the day off, but they wouldn’t because they wanted to work, and they needed the money. And so, they would just keep working, and he wanted folks to be able to have rest and to have joy. And so, now he actually just like, takes them along. And I think it’s so nice, and this article and CNN talks about how often you have the representation in media of Latino folks or day laborers or low wage workers in these cases, presented as in desperation, or just an abject poverty and never with joy or as deserving of rest and relaxation and happiness and like these sorts of things. And so, he’s showing all of this, and he’s got brand partnerships that he says, help, you know, pay his own bills, but that he uses all the donations that he gets from people just to take folks out for a nice day. And I think it’s really lovely and you know, one guy that he talked to said that he helped build Disneyland like, worked on the construction but never actually got to go as a guest. And the kicker on the story made me smile so much because he says at the end, do to do to do, that, you know, often he’ll take his wife and kid.  sorry, his girlfriend. It says “Morales’ girlfriend and their 3-year-old son often accompany him on the Disneyland trips. ‘I’m not sure if he fully grasps what I do yet,’ Morales said, ‘but every time we go to take people to Disney, he asks, ‘Are you going to bring the amigos?’” I thought that was really sweet. It made me smile.

Kai Ryssdal 

There you go. Yeah.

Kimberly Adams

Alright, what’s yours?

Kai Ryssdal

Mine, it’s a quickie. It’s an update. Just because I’ve dumped on Boeing a lot the last couple of pods for not being able to get that frickin thing off the ground. Starliner launched today. It’s in orbit. It’s a big deal.

Kimberly Adams 

You shamed them into a lie. Congratulations.

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s right. It was all me. It was all me. Yeah, they’ll dock with the space station tomorrow. You know, it’s just another another step on getting us off this planet, which is cool.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, which will probably be cooler than the Southwest United States.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yes, it will. Yes, it will. There you go.

Kimberly Adams 

All right. That’s it for us today. We’re going to be back tomorrow. Until then, you can send us your thoughts, question, comments, or because Thursday’s the audio show. Well, I guess they’re all audio shows. But to show you audio clips. You can send us any audio clips or suggested bits that you think we should talk about to make me smart@marketplace.org Or you can leave us a voicemail at 508 You’d be smart.

Kai Ryssdal 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker, who’s in total command this week while Marissa is away on vacation. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. This program is engineered by Juan Carlos Torrado. Thalia Menchaca is our intern.

Kimberly Adams 

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez composed our bouncy theme music. Our senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. And Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.