Marci Ray sat on a metal bunk at Plane State Jail in Dayton and watched as an egg — contraband procured from the prison kitchen — fried on the cement floor.
She recounted the memory from summer 2011 during public testimony in a federal courtroom recently and said that Texas Department of Criminal Justice Director Bobby Lumpkin countered that such an act would be impossible. A Google search suggests that the ideal pan temperature to fry an egg is at least 250 degrees.
But Ray says she knows what she saw, and after posting a video on social media about the incident, many other formerly incarcerated people commented that they’d done the same thing in Texas prisons.
“We cracked it on the floor,” Ray said. “The whole dorm was gathered around it. We watched it cook. It took like an hour and a half, probably, but at the end, we could pick it up. It was an egg that was cooked.”
The egg-frying incident occurred during the first of what would be a decade of summers Ray spent behind bars. She says she remembers thinking that some people, including herself, might not survive the extreme temperatures. “When I saw that egg, I thought, this is what’s happening to the inside of my body,” she said.
She also remembers seeing a thermometer, wrapped in electrical tape, at the Dr. Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville. When she and others removed the tape, they found that the temperature was displayed at 136 degrees. Many Texas prisoners have described forcing toilets to overflow during the summer months so they can lie on the floor in the cool water.
“It’s a very common practice,” Ray said. “In cell block housing, everybody uses their toilet water in the summer. It’s not just a couple of people being extreme or dramatic.”
Ray was released from prison in 2021 and now serves as communications director for Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, an organization that sued the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and its director over the lack of air conditioning, which they claim is causing prisoners to become ill and, in some cases, die. Other plaintiffs include Prisons Community Advocates and Texas Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman said in March 2025 that the lack of air conditioning in Texas prisons amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and likely violates Eighth Amendment rights, ruling that the matter go to trial and urging TDCJ to find an expeditious long-term remedy.
Ray said that over the last year since Pitman’s preliminary injunction was issued, the state agency that oversees Texas prisons made no progress toward delivering a plan for how air conditioning would be installed or funded. Prison officials attempted unsuccessfully to have the suit dismissed. The trial began late last month and after two weeks of testimony, came to an end on April 9 with the judge expected to take several months to issue a ruling.
A spokeswoman for the TDCJ said the agency could not comment on active litigation.
Trial transcripts will be provided in about two weeks, and both sides now have 45 days to provide a summary to Pitman before he delivers a ruling, Ray said, noting that attorneys with Denver-based Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell LLP are handling that filing for the plaintiffs.
“Our attorneys have said that the defendants just proved the case that there is deliberate indifference,” Ray said. “They didn’t have much of a defense. There was an opportunity where they could have said this is an emergency and people are getting sick and dying. They could have said, ‘We care; we just don’t have the money.’ Instead they have said that this isn’t an issue.”
“I asked one of our attorneys, realistically, what they’re thinking,” Ray added. “This case is big, and she expects Judge Pitman to be very mindful in making sure that his response is airtight. That’s great for us. We want him to be thoughtful and we want him to be thorough so it will stand up in appellate court.”
One attorney estimated a ruling could take six months; another said it will likely happen in early 2027. “It’s not going to be this summer,” Ray said. “We need people to hold on to hope and hold on this summer. The reality of legal cases is that TDCJ will likely appeal if the ruling is not in their favor. This is a process.”
TDCJ officials testified during the trial that it will cost about $1.5 billion to cool the entire prison system and acknowledged they haven’t asked the Legislature for all of the necessary funds, instead adding “cool beds,” or air-conditioned living spaces at selected prisons across the state, incrementally, rather than cooling entire facilities at once, to build and maintain credibility with lawmakers.
The prison system’s website states: “Core to the mission of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is protecting the public, our employees, and the inmates in our custody. Over the last several years, the agency has worked to increase the number of cool beds available. TDCJ is dedicated to continuing to add air-conditioned beds in our facilities.”
The Legislature approved $85 million in the 2023 biennium and $118 million last year for air conditioning installation in Texas prisons. Currently, almost 90,000, or 70 percent of Texas inmates, live without AC, according to court documents.
The TDCJ website shows that 52 of the 100-plus Texas prisons are partially air-conditioned but the areas with temperature control are typically visitation rooms, chapels and administrative offices. TDCJ officials also have argued that inmates have access to ice water and respite areas, but advocacy groups say such measures don’t work when the prisoners are locked in their cells and unable to access relief.
Plaintiffs are asking for all Texas prisons to be fully air-conditioned by 2029, which experts from both sides testified is reasonable, Ray said. According to the plaintiffs, at TDCJ’s current pace of installing about 1,500 cool beds per year at various facilities across the state, it will take 23 years to finish the job. Lioness Executive Director Jennifer Toon said, “They’re doing it the absolute slowest way that procurement laws allow.”
The plaintiff’s request also includes heat in the winter months, suggesting that temperatures remain between 65 and 85 degrees, similar to what is required in county jails and federal prisons.
The argument has also been made that many of TDCJ’s old “red brick” prisons do not have the infrastructure to just pop in a window unit and consider the place air-conditioned.
“It is a construction job; it’s not just cutting a hole in a wall,” Ray said. “There are lots of security factors and insulation. All of those things are do-able. It wouldn’t require them to tear down the prison and build a new prison. It would just require additional construction measures, which TDCJ admitted on the stand during the trial.”
The lawsuit against TDCJ was originally filed by Bernhardt Tiede II, a 67-year-old man convicted in a 1996 East Texas murder and the namesake of the Richard Linklater film Bernie, based on a Texas Monthly story by Skip Hollandsworth. Tiede was moved to an air-conditioned cell after having a stroke and the judge withdrew him from the suit, also removing a group that advocates for people with disabilities, saying its mission is not specific to prisoners. Former TDCJ Director Bryan Collier retired last year so he was removed as a defendant. The lawsuit is now filed as Lioness v. Lumpkin.
Ray and Toon aren’t arguing that prison is supposed to be a day at the beach, or even comfortable, but rather that it shouldn’t be a death sentence. TDCJ estimates that at least 26 heat-related deaths have occurred since 1998, classifying dozens of fatalities each year in an ambiguous “other” category or saying that autopsies are pending.
A 2022 Brown University study claims an average of 14 people die each year from heat-related causes in unairconditioned Texas prisons. Ray said she doesn’t know an exact number but her organization receives reports from some of its 400 “inside members,” primarily incarcerated women and transgender people. Some reported that they watched 37-year-old Elizabeth Hagerty die in her unairconditioned cell at the Murray Unit in June 2023 when temperatures were over 100 degrees. Hagerty was scheduled for release later that year.
Hagerty’s death was one of three heat-related fatalities in 2023 that TDCJ reported to the Legislature. “They reported zero heat-related deaths in 2025 with over 15 autopsies pending,” Toon said.
Ray added, “We know from our own lived experience that the number of heat-related deaths is higher than the number they have reported. And if some of them are dying because they’re being cooked to death, that’s not OK. We’re not talking about natural causes. We’re talking about hyperthermia.”
Ray said she was surprised to hear during trial testimony that a “game plan” for AC installation, which Texas Board of Criminal Justice members have referenced in conversations with advocates for years, isn’t really much of a plan at all.
“Board Chair [Eric] Nichols got on the stand and said, ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate to call it a plan.’ It was like he was saying that it was just for optics,” Ray said. “They made it apparent that the document was just to look good and shut people up about the AC.”
It’s also been challenging to get funding; prison air conditioning isn’t a top priority for the Republican-led Texas legislature. The House has voted three times in recent years to require it but the measures died in the Senate. While temperature control is mandatory in county jails, many of those inmates’ charges have not been adjudicated. It’s difficult to garner sympathy for those who have already been convicted and sentenced to prison, advocates say.
However, Texas can move swiftly on a big construction project when it has the political will to do so, plaintiffs’ attorney Erica Grossman has said, referencing a speedy border wall construction project.
Ray said advocates have been told that TDCJ wants AC in its prisons — the extreme heat affects employee health and turnover too — but they don’t have the money. “It was shocking to learn that they have never asked for the full amount to air condition prisons,” she said.
She added that she was asked on the witness stand why this matter is so important to her. She shared that she spent 10 years inside and considers the women who remain incarcerated to be family.
“My first summer home, my partner and I woke up and we had not turned on the air yet,” she said. “The temperature had risen and we were hot, and we were complaining and uncomfortable. There was this moment where we caught each other’s eyes and started crying. The realization that we were complaining because we were mildly uncomfortable when people are fighting to breathe is overwhelming.”
She said it was “emotionally heavy to face [in court] the people who held me captive for 10 years,” but also empowering. She added that she’s hopeful for a favorable ruling and it doesn’t necessarily need to come during the summer months when everyone is thinking about the heat.
“I think from a public perspective, that’s a concern,” she said. “I don’t think that’s an issue for Judge Pitman. He gave us a 91-page opinion that showed great concern for the people incarcerated in Texas, and that was in March [2025], so he was writing that over the winter months. Fortunately, we have a judge who is very intimately familiar with how Texas summers feel. I don’t think that’s going to be forgotten if he has a jacket on the day he decides.”
