Photo by Haim Charbit on Unsplash

At the end of June 2026 much of Europe experienced its highest recorded temperatures since the 1950s.  Cities like Paris approached 41°C, and large parts of the continent were placed under the highest red heat alert. As heatwaves have become longer, more intense, and more frequent, people across Europe have sought relief where they can, retreating to the coast, installing air conditioners, or simply staying indoors during the hottest parts of the day.

Yet these options to avoid the discomforts of extreme heat are not available to everyone.  Media accounts about the unequal impact of extreme heat have focused on those living in poorly insulated housing, working outdoors, or residing in deprived neighbourhoods. But another population has remained mostly absent from mainstream public debate – prisoners. While extreme heat poses significant risks for many different marginalised groups forced to live in impoverished conditions, prisons constitute a unique context because they involve a population that is wholly dependent on the state for their safety. Inmates remain confined within environments that are increasingly ill-suited to a warming climate and are unable to independently reduce their heat exposure. Consequently, extreme heat in prisons raises unique questions about state responsibility, human rights, and institutional accountability.

The recent heatwave reveals something important about imprisonment in the age of human-driven climate change.  Rising temperatures do not only make prisons more uncomfortable, they change how punishment is experienced. In conventional sociolegal scholarship, prisons are often studied as social, legal, or institutional spaces. Such approaches tend to foreground questions of power, governance, and human relations, while leaving the material and environmental conditions through which imprisonment is lived relatively unexplored (Crewe, 2009; Foucault, 2019; Goffman, 2007; Sykes, 2007). There is a tendency to see the physical features of the prison – its concrete walls, metal bars, cramped cells, poor ventilation, and limited access to shade – as constituting the passive ‘setting’ of punishment. During a heatwave, however, these features of imprisonment take on new meaning.

As hotter summers become more common, the prison environment exerts different pressures on inmates. Heat builds up in concrete buildings, lingers in poorly ventilated cells, and can make even basic activities exhausting. Survival in a heatwave depends on more than institutional rules or political decision-making. It is reliant on buildings, water supply, electricity, ventilation, and shade. Climate change brings into sharp relief how punishment is an exercise of both institutional and environmental power. The prison is not just a legal or social system, but a physical place that shapes people’s health and well-being. As extreme heat becomes more frequent, the material environment shows itself to have an active role in how punishment is lived.

This seems particularly evident in France, but also many other parts of continental Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where temperatures are rapidly rising and prisons are rarely designed to withstand prolonged periods of heat. Carceral facilities are ageing, poorly insulated and severely overcrowded (Ford-Plotkin, 2023).  Most are operating at several hundred percent above capacity (MacDonald, 2018). Ventilation is frequently inadequate, and in many prisons, meals may be eaten inside individual cells and alongside toilets that occupy the same confined space. Under these conditions, cells quickly become stifling environments where heat, humidity, odours and stagnant air accumulate throughout the day and night, making the atmosphere feel oppressive and that is even before we factor in extreme weather conditions.

In the United States there have been many constitutional challenges advanced by prisoners who have been forced to endure prolonged periods of heat. While many courts have ruled that being confined under such conditions amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, they have largely presented the issue of extreme heat as an unfortunate natural hazard.  In response, they have ruled that correctional institutions have an obligation to take precautionary measures to ensure the safety of ‘high risk’ prisoners (e.g. obese, elderly, and those suffering from co-morbidities) (Gerrard, 2018).

There are two problems this framing of extreme heat poses.  First, it treats the harm endured by prisoners as a natural and inevitable consequence of climate, compounded only by individual vulnerabilities. This draws attention away from how prisons actively participate in generating these harms, rendering prisoners more vulnerable to heat-related illness. Solar radiation does not produce extreme heat on its own. It combines with concrete, poor ventilation, humidity, crowded prison cells, limited access to water and the outdoors, and inadequate medical care to produce the kind of ‘extreme’ heat that induces suffering.  Second, the court’s formulation of extreme heat imposes an obligation on the state to undertake actions that would only mitigate the effects of extreme heat on already vulnerable inmates. Vulnerability is treated as an individual condition rather than something shaped by social or institutional factors. Some people are seen as being more vulnerable to extreme heat.  To hold the state responsible, courts require evidence that the harm a person experiences can be directly linked to state policy or institutional neglect. In other words, the state’s actions (or its failure to act when an inmate is already vulnerable) must have caused the unbearable discomfort, death, or illness resulting from exposure to high temperatures. If this causal link cannot be established, the harm is treated as an unavoidable consequence of ‘natural’ forces rather than a failure of the state. As I have argued in my recently published book, casting environmental harms as ‘natural’ places them beyond legal scrutiny, obscuring the political and institutional decisions that make those harms possible or exacerbate its effects.  The language of ‘nature’ presents preventable suffering as unavoidable (Gilani, 2026).

Climate change requires us to think prison conditions differently. As Europe continues to warm, already the fastest-warming continent on Earth, extreme heat is actively shaping the experience of imprisonment in France, England, and beyond. Solar radiation – the energy emitted by the Sun and absorbed by the Earth – only becomes extreme heat under particular atmospheric and environmental conditions. As less of this energy is reflected back into space by melting polar ice caps exposing darker ocean waters, and more of the Earth’s emitted heat is trapped by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, extreme heat becomes both a consequence and a driver of climate processes that intensify global warming. The heat radiating from trapped solar energy is amplified by urban centres, where dark asphalt roads absorb more sunlight, concrete buildings store more heat, tall buildings decrease airflow, and less vegetation means less evaporative cooling. Climate scientists have termed this the urban heat island (UHI) effect. UHI effect explains why Parisians experienced temperatures at least five to ten degrees higher than the surrounding rural areas during the recent heatwave.

Within prisons, the conditions that intensify heat are particularly pronounced.  Many prisons are made of concrete and steel, materials that absorb and retain heat throughout the day.  Small windows and windowless cells restrict airflow, locked cell doors prevent inmates from moving to cooler areas, and limited access to showers amplify the experience of heat. High temperatures, combined with the humidity and poor ventilation common in many prisons, also create ideal conditions for rapid mould growth. As mould adapts and mutates in response to warmer climates, its capacity to cause disease also increase (Gilani, 2026). The materials and design of prisons therefore not only intensify heat exposure but also magnify its health consequences by creating environments in which heat-related illness and other risks become more likely. Together, these features turn prison cells into thermal traps that can threaten prisoners’ health and wellbeing. Extreme heat emerges from the interaction of climate, urban planning, building materials, prison design, institutional practices, and even microbial life.

These material forces shape both how prisoners experience heat, and also how their bodies function within it. As prison buildings absorb and trap heat, people begin to sweat more in an effort to cool themselves. As the body loses water, it becomes dehydrated, making it harder to digest food, transport nutrients, and remove waste (Walter and Carraretto, 2016). As dehydration worsens, blood volumes fall, placing greater demands on the cardiovascular system and making it increasingly difficult for the body to regulate its temperature. In the absence of cooling equipment, body temperatures continue to rise, increasing the risk of heat exhaustion, heatstroke, and other heat-related illnesses.

Heatwaves become particularly dangerous when temperatures remain high during the night, like they did in Paris during the recent heatwave. Without cooler nighttime conditions, buildings continue to retain and emit heat. In poorly ventilated prison cells, trapped heat and stale air prevent bodies from cooling down, and can disrupt restorative sleep. Over consecutive nights, this cumulative sleep loss contributes to cognitive fatigue, impaired decision-making, and emotional distress.  Heat can also alter the speed of nerve signalling, neurotransmitter release, and protein functioning in nerve cells. As a consequence, inmates may experience inattentiveness, loss of concentration, and impaired memory, which may result in irritability, poorer judgement, impulsive decision-making, and difficulty solving problems (Walter and Carraretto, 2016). Unsurprisingly, both staff and inmates in French prisons have observed that tempers become shorter and “tensions rise more quickly” during periods of extreme heat. These behavioural changes cannot be solely attributed to individual disposition. They emerge from altered physiological states produced by the prison environment itself. Heat brings into sharper relief how imprisonment is an ecological process that shapes prison sociality and the bodily experience of incarceration. Within the prison setting these consequences are intensified given the severe overcrowding and strict limits on movement. Since inmates cannot remove themselves from heat or social tensions, the physiological effects of extreme temperature rises becomes inseparable from the social experience of violence, intimidation, and insecurity (Colucci et al., 2023: 638).

Approaching extreme heat as a ‘natural’ event ignores the extent to which prisons are active participants in transforming solar radiation into something harmful, something ‘extreme’. Concrete walls, steel bars, ventilation systems, mouldy showers, and limited water supply are more than just the setting in which punishment happens. By absorbing, radiating and trapping heat, they directly shape how imprisonment is lived by inmates. Bennett uses the word ‘thing-power’ to refer to the physical world’s capacity to affect people’s bodies, behaviours, and experience (Bennett, 2010). Others describe it as forms of ‘material agency’ (Coole and Frost, 2010), the idea that materials or ‘things’ have the capacity to act on the world. That is not to say that things possess intention or make conscious choices. Rather they exhibit a certain directionality, a capacity to generate effects and shape outcomes that cannot be traced solely to human will (Davies, 2022). Those effects may, in turn, produce consequences that no individual person explicitly intended. But that does not mean we bear no responsibility.

Recognising material agency does not absolve people or institutions of responsibility. Distributing agency is not the same as distributing blame. Rather, it reminds us that responsibility extends to the material conditions we create, maintain, and govern, because these conditions help shape how harm is produced and experienced by individuals. The effects of weather and climate are not ‘natural’, in the sense that we tend to use the term ‘nature’ to describe elements of life that human societies have no control over. The state does not control the Sun, but that does not mean that it should not take the Sun into account in terms of what it can control: prison design, cell occupancy, ventilation, access to water, medical treatment, limitations on movement, etc. While heat is materially produced, its translation into something harmful is institutionally mediated. The physical and social organisation of the prison determines whether solar energy becomes dangerous or not. Solar radiation acts, but it does not act alone. It acts alongside the prison, which is an active participant in the effects that solar radiation generates.

What makes this kind of material analysis particularly relevant to studies of incarceration is its treatment of vulnerability. A material analysis shifts vulnerability from an individual attribute to a relationship. Instead of asking ‘who’ is vulnerable, we ask how is vulnerability produced? This ultimately changes our understanding of state responsibility. If vulnerability is treated as an individual trait, the state’s obligation is limited to protecting those deemed especially vulnerable. Legal responsibility for heat-related illness and death then stems from the state’s failure to protect the already vulnerable. If vulnerability is understood as emerging from a relationship between bodies and their environment, then attention shifts to the prison itself. The question is no longer whether staff identified the ‘right’ prisoners as high risk and offered them protection, but why the state was confining people in conditions that made them vulnerable in the first place. As Brunn and others have observed “people do not die from extreme heat events alone – they die from specific social, political, and infrastructural configurations that render them vulnerable to the effects of heat” (Brunn et al., 2025: 368). A relational model of vulnerability thus changes the scale of the problem, broadening the state’s responsibility from a few ‘high risk’ individuals, to addressing the conditions that generate those risks for everyone.

Using the language of ‘nature’ makes heat extraordinary.  We only take notice of it when there is a sudden rise in disease incidence, or acute cases of heat illness or death. When heat becomes, in a sense, ‘extreme’. The harms that unfold gradually through the everyday conditions of prison life, where solar radiation is in continuous interaction with institutional architecture and practice to shape human bodies and experience remains largely invisible. Heat exposure can, over time, produce cumulative stresses on the body, making individuals more vulnerable to disease and illness. Naturalising heat obscures how rising temperatures may slowly and gradually erode imprisoned bodies and capacities over time. Berlant refers to this gradual wearing down of marginalised bodies as ‘slow death’ (Berlant, 2007). Prison heat is not only a question of acute risk during extreme weather events – like the end of June 2026 – but a condition of slow attrition in which repeated exposure to excessive temperatures gradually weakens bodies, capacities, and possibilities for well-being. Slow death becomes more likely as the effects of climate change become normalised.

The experience of extreme heat by prisoners is not simply a question of penal justice. When we ask how the state should punish, we are ultimately appealing to abstract human values like ‘proportionality’ or ‘deterrence’ to justify the infliction of suffering. The material conditions under which punishment is carried out is generally ignored unless it can be shown that it imposes suffering that is disproportionate to its political and social aims. Yet extreme heat complicates this framework because the experience of punishment is not produced solely through human decision-making. It is also shaped by nonhuman forces and  material conditions that extend beyond the intention of legislators, judges, and prison officials. Incarceration in the shadow of climate change raises questions of environmental justice. If prisons actually generate and amplify extreme heat through their architectures, modes of operation, and policies, then they are helping to produce the very conditions that make climate change harmful. But this harm is not equally distributed.  Prisons reflect the inequalities that already exist in society, meaning that people from poorer backgrounds and racial minorities are disproportionately incarcerated. Thus, prisons may be playing a further role in concentrating environmental harms among already disadvantaged communities. Prisons use ‘thermal violence’  (Starosielski, 2019) and reproduce and reinforce ‘thermal inequality’ (Brunn et al., 2025: 368).

As the effects of climate change intensify, we are faced with the question of how to best mitigate its effects. A material approach to extreme heat challenges us to reconsider what we call ‘natural’ events and alerts us to how appeals to ‘nature’ can be used to obscure legal and political responsibility. For far too long our governing institutions have proceeded from the view that we are not responsible for ‘natural’ forces.  In the case of climate change, there is growing evidence to suggest that we, in fact, may have some hand in this. Nature does not act alone, but in concert with human decision-making. Climate change is a set of material processes whose effects – extreme heat being one – are shaped by social decisions, built environments, and institutional practice. It is only by recognising this relationship that we may be able to effectively identify when and where (political and legal) intervention is required.

• Sabrina Gilani is a legal academic who uses posthumanist and new materialist theory to critique the practice and experience of imprisonment and the death penalty. See her newly published book Punishment: New Trajectories in Law for more on punishment ecology and material accounts of penal power.

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