Inmates Left to Rot in 120-Degree Heat

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Inmates Left to Rot in 120-Degree Heat
Inmates in Joe Arpaio’s Tent City are being subjected to outdoor temperatures as high as 120 degrees in the latest heat wave.
Kelly Weill
06.21.17 1:00 AM ET


An ongoing heatwave in Phoenix, Arizona is so extreme that flights out of the region have been cancelled. But inmates at Tent City, a notorious outdoor jail, are expected to endure conditions too dangerous for jet planes.

The Tent City began as an overflow site for Maricopa County, Arizona’s already-packed jails. The fenced-in facility has housed up to 1,700 inmates outdoors in canvas tents, where temperatures ranged well above and below safe limits, earning the condemnation of human rights organizations. For more than two decades, the lockup’s founder, infamous former Maricopa Sheriff Joe Arpaio appeared to revel in the criticism, at one point publicly joking that Tent City was a “concentration camp”. When Arpaio lost his 2016 reelection bid, his successor pledged to dismantle the facility by the end of 2017.

But while heat wave temperatures soar to 120 degrees Fahrenheit and Phoenix officials warn locals to remain inside, hundreds of Tent City inmates remain confined outdoors.

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Arizona officials know what happens when people are forced outside in the state’s dangerous heat. Less than an hour away from Tent City is Perryville, a state prison complex where, in 2009, a 48-year-old woman died after being locked in an outdoor cage for four hours during a 107-degree heat wave.

The woman, Marcia Powell, was isolated in the outdoor enclosure after she requested to see a psychiatrist. Prison policy prohibited inmates from remaining in the cage for more than 30 minutes. But Powell was kept outside for at least four hours, during which time she developed first- and second-degree burns before dying of heat-related complications.

“When her autopsy was performed, her core body temperature was 108. The autopsy stated that the only reason they wrote down 108 was because that’s the highest the thermometer would go,” Hamm said. “We got a tour of that facility after she was killed. I’m not going to say ‘died.’ She was killed. Her cage was 20 feet from an air-conditioned glass room where the guards were standing. There was utterly no plausible excuse to claim, as they did, that they didn’t notice the distress she was in.”


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http://www.thedailybeast.com/inmates-left-to-rot-in-120-degree-heat