Statement from Climate Justice Coalition for California Prisons on AB 2499

On June 11th, the California Legislature chose to let Adrienne’s Act die.

The original version of AB 2499, Adrienne’s Act, would have established mandatory climate safety standards in California’s correctional facilities. The bill was named after Adrienne Boulware, a 47-year-old woman who was killed by extreme heat inside the Central California Women’s Facility just months before she was set to come home. The bill carried her name because what happened to her was preventable, and because the people still inside those facilities deserve protections that this state has refused, year after year, to put in place.

We are devastated. We are disappointed. And we are not done.

We, the Climate Justice coalition, were proud co-sponsors of AB 2499 alongside every advocate, family member, formerly incarcerated leader, and currently incarcerated person who lent their voice to this fight. Your work was not wasted. Your voices and your stories built the foundation for what comes next

By allowing the desecration and failure of this bill, California political members have disregarded the will and need of their constituents by denying humane treatment of those within their care. AB 2499 asked California to do something long overdue: to write into law how it intends to keep people safe while incarcerated. The bill would have required the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to put minimum relief measures in place during extreme weather, to equip living quarters, work areas, and recreation spaces with cooling, and to install shade where the heat hits hardest. It would have built a temperature-monitoring program across prisons in different climate zones so that conditions inside could finally be measured, and it would have brought the people who labor in these facilities under the same indoor-heat protections that cover every other worker in the state.

All of the measures were the difference between life and death for people who cannot open a window, cannot buy a fan, cannot find shade that doesn’t exist, and cannot flee when the fire starts. California holds total custody over the safety of everyone inside its prisons. A climate safety standard is a responsibility during a climate change era that consists of 100-plus-degree summers. The state’s own researchers identified eighteen prisons as acutely exposed to extreme heat, and tens of thousands of people are living inside them as this summer’s temperatures climb. When people in those facilities were surveyed, sixty percent said they had never once been given access to an air-conditioned room on an extremely hot day, and eighty-seven percent said the yard they use most often has no shade at all. These are the conditions that killed Adrienne, and they remain in place today.

We have heard the objections that the state cannot afford to fix this. California already spends roughly $106,000 every year to incarcerate a single person, and its prison system stands as a long and expensive record of what neglect costs once the courts are finally forced to step in. Against that ledger, a working generator and a shade structure are trivial. The truly unaffordable line item is the next preventable death. People housed in concrete cells, often without adequate ventilation, water, or medical care, are subjected to heat conditions that would shut down any workplace in this state. The deaths are documented. The moral case is unambiguous.

This bill failed because the people with the power to advance it chose not to. They chose cost estimates over human lives. They chose the comfort of inaction over the discomfort of accountability. They chose to leave thousands of people incarcerated in California prisons vulnerable to the same conditions that killed Adrienne. Make no mistake, this summer heat will be as brutal as it has always been. People will die under the state’s watch.

The case for AB 2499 was written long before the Legislature took it up, in fire after fire and flood after flood. In August 2020, as the LNU Lightning Complex burned more than a thousand structures and killed five people in Solano County, the California Medical Facility and Solano State Prison sat inside the evacuation zone, and no one held there was moved. A year later, the Dixie Fire knocked out power to the California Correctional Center in Susanville, where people spent nearly a month in the dark while smoke drifted through failing ventilation and where, by their own accounts, they had never seen an evacuation plan or practiced a single drill. This past January, the Hughes Fire reached the Castaic jail complex while the sheriff warned everyone nearby that their lives depended on leaving at once; the roughly 4,700 people held there could not leave because most of the county’s transport buses were not even running. A mile from the Hurst Fire, ninety-six children at Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall waited out an active evacuation warning on the strength of a plan their keepers said they had ready, should they ever need it.

Each of these is the predictable result of a system that has never planned for the climate it now lives in. When researchers at UCLA surveyed people across California’s prisons, more than eighty percent had never taken part in an evacuation drill, though the department’s own rules require one every quarter. Among those who had lived through wildfire near their prison, more than four in five came away with burning lungs, eyes, and throats, and only about a quarter were ever handed a mask. The department’s operations manual, the very document meant to govern emergencies, does not so much as mention wildfire, flooding, or extreme heat. AB 2499 would have begun to close that gap. Its death leaves the gap exactly where catastrophe keeps finding it.

The Climate Justice Coalition for California Prisons will continue to pursue justice for the incarcerated people and their families. We continue to call for California legislators to take urgent action and pass legislation to end these inhumane conditions. Driven by the memories of every person who has died or suffered inside a California correctional facility because of extreme heat. We will continue to collect information from incarcerated people about the ongoing harm of extreme heat inside California’s prisons. We will keep fighting for Adrienne’s Act until mandatory climate safety standards are the law in every correctional facility in this state.

To Adrienne’s family and all of the families impacted by this atrocity: We appreciate all of your efforts. We hear you. You should not have had to carry this fight at all, let alone watch it stall in a committee room. We stand with you all the way. Your loved one’s name and memory will not be forgotten.

To everyone who took action — who called, who wrote, who shared their stories, who showed up — thank you. This is a setback. It is not the end.