At least 41 people have died in stifling, uncooled prisons of either heart-related or unknown causes during Texas’ relentless and record-breaking heat wave this summer, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.

Relatives of those who died and prison rights advocates insist at least some of those deaths were caused by the heat. More than a dozen of the prisoners were in their 20s or 30s, with at least four people 35 and under reportedly dying of cardiac arrest or heart failure. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice says no prisoner has died from the brutal heat in its facilities since 2012, around the time the agency began being bombarded with wrongful death and civil rights lawsuits over the heat.

On Monday, Democrats on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability implored Republican Chair James Comer to launch an investigation into conditions at prisons enduring sweltering temperatures, especially in Texas. The request follows the Republican committee members’ investigation into conditions for defendants jailed on charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

“The capacity of prisons and jails to adequately prepare for and provide resources to meet the increasingly extreme weather caused by climate change deserves immediate attention from this Committee,” the Democrats, including Texas Reps. Greg Casar and Jasmine Crockett, wrote. “If Committee Republicans are serious about conducting oversight of the conditions within prisons and correctional facilities, and not just playing politics with a single facility, it is critical that you demand that facilities across the country hold inmates in a humane environment and not limit your interest to a single facility.”

Comer’s office did not immediately respond to questions about the letter.

More than two-thirds of Texas’ 100 prisons don’t have air conditioning in most living areas inside the concrete and steel buildings where officers and prisoners work and live. With little to no ventilation and temperatures routinely soaring into the triple digits outside, the thermometer reading often rises even higher inside the prisons.

Since June, at least a dozen prisoners have died from reported cardiac arrest or heart failure in uncooled prisons on days when the regions’ outdoor heat indices were above 100 degrees, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of prison death reports and weather data. At least another 29 have died of what are still unknown causes pending autopsy results.

The death count is likely higher, as prisons have 30 days to report a prisoner’s death to the state.

This story was first published in The Texas Tribune, and can be viewed here.

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Editor’s note: See this full KVUE Defenders report Wednesday on KVUE News at 6 p.m.

An acclaimed film director and a Texas prison inmate whose story spawned the movie “Bernie” have launched a fight for him to be held in an air-conditioned facility. It’s a legal crusade attorneys say could help others incarcerated in the state’s sweltering prisons.

The pushback follows what the state climatologist says was Texas's second hottest summer on record. The heatwave put a new and urgent emphasis on the lack of universal air conditioning inside the state’s more than 100 prison facilities.

The KVUE Defenders obtained exclusive video of Bernie Tiede talking about conditions inside the Huntsville unit where he is housed.

“You wake up, and you’re just rolling in sweat,” Tiede says in one video.

Texas-based film director and producer Richard Linklater, whose famous works include “Dazed and Confused” and “Boyhood,” took a series of videos of Tiede inside the maximum-security Estelle Unit in Huntsville on Aug. 4. In them, Tiede describes the broiling conditions inside the unit.

“There’s no escape,” Bernie says in the video. “You can’t get away from it, unless you put something wet on your face or you have a chill towel or something like that.”

A dozen years earlier, Linklater made Tiede’s story of killing an elderly East Texas woman and storing her body in a freezer the plot of the acclaimed 2011 dark comedy “Bernie.”

Linklater, working with Tiede’s new legal team, went to see him in prison after learning about his declining health.

“He wasn’t really the Bernie I knew,” Linklater said of his visit with Teide. “He was always positive. He’s teaching, always doing things for others. He was happy to see me, and I noticed, everyone around, there was just this pall over everything.”

A couple of weeks later, Tiede’s legal team filed a lawsuit against the State of Texas in federal court in Austin, asking that Tiede be urgently moved from his unairconditioned housing to an air-conditioned facility.

They argue because of his overall health, including hypertension and diabetes, that “if Mr. Tiede’s deadly incarceration conditions continue, unabated, Mr. Tiede is likely to die this summer, in 2023.”

Richard Linklater KVUE TV Interview online