Through the window of his cell, Lonnie Kocontes could see the fans blowing, but all he felt was the heat bearing down.
It was early September, and the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa had been on lockdown that morning. According to Kocontes, he and the other incarcerated people in his housing area couldn’t leave their cells.
“It’s stifling and it’s frustrating,” said Kocontes, 68, during a recent phone call with KPBS. “If you’re on lockdown, you can’t do anything.”
Last month’s heat wave sent temperatures soaring inside the state prison, according to three incarcerated people who spoke to KPBS. Amid the brutally hot weather, they said, prison officials also imposed lockdowns for multiple days — restricting access to large fans, ice water and other ways to stay cool.
Advocates and civil rights attorneys said the accounts from inside Donovan highlight the urgent need for California prison officials to better protect incarcerated people from high temperatures — especially as climate change is expected to fuel more frequent and intense heat waves.
“This goes far beyond discomfort,” said Lily Harvey, a senior staff attorney with the nonprofit Prison Law Office in Berkeley. “People are really suffering, and they're scared.”
A spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR, confirmed that Donovan officials locked down parts of the prison during the heat wave.
In an email to KPBS, CDCR spokesperson Mary Xjimenez said prison officials imposed the lockdowns because of “security concerns” but continued to follow department heat safety protocols.
Xjimenez would not agree to an interview and declined to answer specific questions.
Aging prisons, inconsistent protocols
Donovan state prison sits along the southern edge of San Diego County.
The prison is in an industrial corner of Otay Mesa. Across the street, a power plant churns shimmering heat into the air. Eighteen-wheeler trucks rumble in and out of a cluster of Amazon warehouses down the road.
Donovan is one of eight state prisons that are especially vulnerable to climate change, according to a 2023 report by the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.
Extreme heat events top the list of those climate risks for incarcerated people, said Eric Henderson, the center’s policy director and a co-author of the report.
“This is one of these events that … almost everyone universally experiences in the prison system,” Henderson said.
Experiencing heat in prison is very different from experiencing it on the outside.
California’s prison system is aging. The state’s prisons are 50 years old on average, with some of them dating as far back as the Gold Rush. Donovan state prison is about 40 years old. Many facilities were built from concrete and other materials that don’t keep out heat or cold. Less than a quarter have traditional air conditioning.
CDCR is supposed to keep track of how hot and cold it gets at each facility, but there are few standards for when and where to measure those temperatures.
Inside, incarcerated people don’t have open access to cooling measures like ice water and air conditioning, said Matt Cate, a former inspector general who oversaw the state prison system. Instead, he said they rely entirely on prison officials to protect them.
“They don't have control of the heating and cooling mechanisms,” said Cate, who later served as CDCR’s secretary. “When you're in prison, all of your freedoms and safety (are) in the hands of the administration.”
All of those factors add up to a system that CDCR acknowledges struggles to keep incarcerated people and prison staff safe during extreme heat.
Those impacts especially affect people of color. Incarcerated people across the state are disproportionately Black and Latino, while white people are underrepresented, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. CDCR does not provide individual data on Asian Americans, Native Americans and other racial groups.
CDCR does have a special set of steps they’re supposed to follow during a heat wave.
When temperatures rise above 90 degrees outside, prison officials are supposed to move people vulnerable to heat stress indoors, Harvey said. If temperatures continue to rise inside, they’re supposed to take further steps, including providing all incarcerated people with ways to stay cool and monitor their health.
The protocol is important, Harvey said, but it also falls short. For example, it doesn’t specify details like which cooling measures to implement and when.
“The language is pretty general,” she said. “There's some major flaws in what it does and doesn't account for.”
Lockdowns amid high temperatures
As an intense and humid heat wave struck San Diego County last month, the three incarcerated men said the days and nights at Donovan were miserable.
KPBS spoke with Kocontes and two other incarcerated people: Brian Christman and Grant, who asked to only be identified by his first name because he feared retaliation. KPBS verified that they are all incarcerated at Donovan using CDCR’s online record system.
KPBS was not able to independently verify the conditions that Kocontes, Christman and Grant described. But their accounts align closely with concerns raised by incarcerated people at other state prisons.
All three men said they live in the same housing area without access to traditional air conditioning. Instead, they said the unit uses a centralized “swamp cooler” or evaporative cooler system that tends to blow dusty, room-temperature air around.
None of the three men are considered vulnerable to heat stress by prison officials, they said — although Christman believes he is at higher risk because of an old brain injury that he believes stems from heat stroke. Grant also said he has high blood pressure and is careful to limit his physical activity when it gets hot.
During the September heat wave, temperatures in the surrounding neighborhood of Otay Mesa rose as high as 100 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
Some incarcerated people, including Grant, have clocks with thermometers in their cells. Grant said the thermometer reached 94 degrees. Kocontes doesn’t have his own thermometer but said he heard from people in neighboring cells that they recorded similar temperatures.
At the same time, all three men said there were multiple days where prison officials placed their housing unit on lockdown — what CDCR calls “modified program” — during the heat wave.
According to Kocontes, Donovan officials imposed the lockdown after an incarcerated person allegedly attacked a correctional officer. In a public notice on Sept. 10, around the height of the heat wave, CDCR confirmed they were investigating an attack at the prison but did not mention any lockdowns.
During lockdowns, the three men said, they were confined to their cells for most of the day, except for showers, meals and picking up medication. That left them limited time to spend outside or in the common area with large fans.
“I'm surprised that we didn't have people falling out from heat exhaustion,” Kocontes said at one point. After a moment, he added: “We may have, and I just don’t know about it.”
Xjimenez, the CDCR spokesperson, said prison officials imposed lockdowns “on some yards” between Sept. 10 and Sept. 17.
The spokesperson also said Donovan had air conditioning units in some of its medical facilities break down early in the month.
“Staff immediately took action, working with its vendor to repair the system, and in the meantime installed a temporary A/C unit to provide effective cooling and transferred some heat-risk incarcerated people to other areas,” Xjimenez wrote.
‘They're not genuinely concerned’
To Kocontes, Christman and Grant, it felt like Donovan officials were not doing enough to keep them safe.
The men alleged that prison staff weren’t following all of the CDCR heat plan steps during the lockdowns, and they questioned whether other aspects of the plan were really doing anything to help.
For one, Kocontes said prison staff didn’t always enforce the protocol of bringing people vulnerable to heat indoors on hotter days. Christman said he worried that it was actually warmer inside their cells — and that, when prison officials did follow the plan, vulnerable people remained at risk.
“They're not genuinely concerned whether you're OK or not," Christman said.
All three incarcerated people said prison staff failed to consistently provide them with ways to cool themselves on the hottest days.
Kocontes said correctional officers did sometimes take the step of cracking their cell doors open by about six inches to improve airflow. But the men said that officers weren’t checking on them or supplying them with ice water regularly.
On hot days, they said, prison staff would put a container of ice water in the day room. Often, the water would quickly run out, and staff would only sometimes refill it. On days when they were locked down, the men said they might not be able to get to the ice water all day — and that staff might not even bother to put it out.
“There were certainly days where it was in the low 90s in the cells that we had no access to ice water,” Kocontes said.
Kocontes and Christman also said that they rarely — if ever — saw prison staff taking temperature readings in their housing unit. Meanwhile, they said, correctional officers had access to traditional air conditioning in their office and a dedicated fan in the communal area.
Xjimenez, the CDCR spokesperson, denied that Donovan officials did not follow the steps of the heat plan but did not directly respond to the three men’s description of events.
Incarcerated people at other state prisons have also reported similar conditions to oversight officials, advocates and civil rights lawyers.
In a letter to CDCR this past May, the Prison Law Office and another civil rights law firm, Rosen Bien Galvan and Grunfeld LLP, said incarcerated people at many other prisons had never seen staff take temperature readings.
The letter, filed in federal court last month, said two Central Valley prisons were similarly failing to bring vulnerable people indoors on hot days. At one of them, the Substance Abuse and Treatment facility in Corcoran, the attorneys wrote that staff would also place ice water in the day room where people could not access it while locked in their cells.
Last year, the state’s Inspector General found that CDCR staff at three other prisons were failing to consistently track temperatures in housing areas and did not have procedures in place to protect many people in prison.
Both Henderson and Harvey said the accounts were in line with what they heard from other incarcerated people in the course of their work.
Harvey cautioned that she didn’t have enough information to say whether Donovan officials broke from CDCR’s heat plan. But she said the protocol does not address the question of what should happen when prison officials impose a lockdown during a heat event.
Cate, the former inspector general and CDCR leader, said anyone of “good conscience” should be concerned when a prison like Donovan experiences a heat wave. He said oversight officials should consider looking more closely at conditions inside.
“I know the Inspector General's office has been looking into these issues in other facilities,” Cate said. “It may be fair to ask whether the conditions in Donovan are severe enough to warrant some additional IG investigations there, specifically.”
Advocates push for increased safety measures
As human-caused fossil fuel emissions continue to drive global warming, incarcerated people and their advocates are pressing state officials to better protect them.
The Prison Law Office has urged CDCR to install air conditioning across the prison system. In their May letter, they argued that it was “the only effective long-term solution to addressing extreme heat,” but said the department had not yet agreed to take those steps.
Until then, the law firm said the agency should immediately install heat sensors in all housing units, offer to move high-risk patients to air-conditioned housing and set up cooling centers for all incarcerated people.
CDCR estimates retrofitting all California state prisons with air conditioning would cost $6 billion. The agency is currently testing a $38 million air conditioning pilot program at three prisons in Los Angeles and the Central Valley.
Cate, who now works as a consultant in Sacramento, thinks most prison officials across the country would love to have air conditioning installed. But he argued that state lawmakers would have to set aside money for those renovations.
Alternatively, Cate said, the federal courts could also step in.
In California, federal judges and special court-appointed officers known as “receivers” have sweeping powers over CDCR. That’s because of two ongoing federal civil rights lawsuits over medical care and mental healthcare in the state prison system.
Cate said the receivers or judges in those cases could order California to begin air-conditioning all of its prisons immediately — and force the state to spend the money to do so.
“There's no real limits to their power when it comes to medical care and mental healthcare in California,” he said.
Just last month, a federal judge ruled that Texas must air-condition all state prisons by the end of 2029, after a group of formerly incarcerated women sued the state.
Henderson said there are other, smaller steps CDCR could take more quickly. He said prison officials could suspend penalties for incarcerated people who re-tailor their state-issued pants into shorts. They could also start reissuing free cooling rags, he said, and distribute additional personal fans.
Henderson also said he would want to see state officials identify vulnerable incarcerated people for early release, like they did during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Harvey said she is hopeful that growing awareness is building beyond imprisoned people and their families.
Earlier this year, Assemblymember Mike Gipson (D-Gardena) introduced Assembly Bill 2499, known as Adrienne’s Act. The bill would have required CDCR to overhaul its cooling measures, including by installing heat sensors and air conditioning.
Gipson’s bill was named for Adrienne Boulware, an incarcerated woman who died during a 2024 heat wave at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. In April, he told a legislative committee that she was just a year away from going home.
“Her death is not just a statistic,” Gipson said. “It is a warning that the status quo is failing, and the inaction has real human consequences.”
Lawmakers ultimately failed to move Gipson’s bill forward. Advocates said they’ll keep pushing next year.
In Otay Mesa this weekend, temperatures again spiked to 100 degrees.
