Jeff Brandes: Not cruel enough — Florida’s prisons and the heat that punishes without mercy

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“I was in prison, and you came to visit me.” — Matthew 25:36

The Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. You’d think that would settle the question of whether a person should be left to endure 100-degree heat in a locked dormitory with no air conditioning, no airflow, and no escape. But in Florida, the state argues that this kind of heat doesn’t rise to the level of cruelty. It’s just part of the sentence.

That was the argument made by state attorneys defending conditions at Dade Correctional Institution, a Miami-Dade prison that houses more than 1,500 men — many elderly or medically fragile. A federal lawsuit details unrelenting heat, broken fans, and failed ventilation systems. Since 2021, at least four men have died from heat-related causes at that one facility alone. The judge allowed the case to proceed.

The state’s defense? The suffering isn’t cruel enough to be unconstitutional.

This isn’t just legal hair-splitting. It’s a moral collapse.

I’ve been inside that prison. I’ve stood in those dorms in the middle of summer. One summer, while walking prisons with Sen. Jason Pizzo, I remember the sweat clinging to our skin as the air stood still. Inside was hotter than outside. The showers felt like steam chambers. Inmates shuffled by with walkers and canes. In another prison, the kitchen had cockroaches moving in waves. What shocked me most wasn’t how bad the conditions were — it was how routine they’d become.

In 2023, the state commissioned a report from KPMG to assess the Florida prison system. The results were damning. Over one-third of Florida’s correctional institutions were in “critical” or “poor” condition. More than 500 housing units — about one in five statewide — lacked air conditioning entirely. The report called for $2.2 billion in immediate repairs, including $582 million just for HVAC systems.

What happened after that?

Nothing.

No surge in funding. No emergency legislative session. No site visits from the state’s highest office. Just silence.

In hopes of spurring action, the Florida Policy Project prepared a brief summarizing the KPMG report’s reasonable recommendations. I am writing today to urge legislators to review this report again and take action.

See the brief report here.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has been in office for over six years. In that time, he’s visited Ukraine, the southern border, and the headquarters of nearly every culture war. He has not toured a single Florida state prison. He’s not alone. Most lawmakers haven’t either. It’s a blind spot made not of malice, but of convenience. Because it’s easier to ignore a system that’s out of view — easier still if you can rationalize it as “tough on crime.”

If you never enter the building, you never smell the mildew, never feel the 102-degree air pressing against your skin, never look into the eyes of someone whose sentence has become a slow dehydration.

But this negligence isn’t contained inside prison walls. Would you work a 12-hour shift in a concrete box with no airflow and no relief? Our refusal to fix the conditions inside our prisons is directly fueling a staffing crisis.

It’s not just inhumane — it’s unsustainable.

And this is where it gets darkest: the heat isn’t a failure of policy. It is the policy. When the state shrugs at sweltering cells, sees insect infestations and aging men collapsing from heat exhaustion, and does nothing, it sends a message — this is what they deserve.

That’s not justice. That’s cruelty by design.

Matthew 25 doesn’t ask if the incarcerated are likable. It doesn’t ask if they’re innocent. It asks whether we showed up. Whether we were willing to see. Whether we recognized their humanity in the middle of our indifference.

Florida’s prisons are functioning exactly as our neglect allows them to. The heat isn’t just atmospheric. It’s institutional. And every day we delay fixing it, we make a quiet, but deadly, choice.

The next time someone says the punishment isn’t cruel enough, ask: how hot does it have to get?

As the Legislature begins to negotiate the budget this week, leadership needs to ask:

Will we finally invest in dignity and safety — or keep letting the Summer do our punishment for us?

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Former Sen. Jeff Brandes is the founder and president of the Florida Policy Project.