Louisiana spends $1 million on litigation to avoid installing nine air conditioners in prison

Rss@dailykos.com (josie Duffy Rice) · Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 8:11 pm
Louisiana is broke.

The state is dealing with the "grimmest financial situation of the past 30 years – possibly ever in modern history," The Times-Picayune reported in February. Currently, the state is facing a $600 million budget gap.

Louisiana also incarcerates more people per capita than any other state. Last year alone, the state spent $700 million on prisons. Meanwhile, the state has significantly cut funding for public defenders. From The Atlantic:

The small chunk of [public defense] funding that comes from state appropriations—about $16.5 million in 2014—is spread thinner every year to stanch mounting deficits[...] What’s more, the 2017 annual budget, approved by the legislature, slashes public-defender funding by an additional 62 percent—a cut “that would require additional service restrictions on a scale unprecedented in the history of American public defense,” wrote the president of the American Bar Association in a letter to Louisiana’s governor.

You may be surprised to find out, then, that Louisiana spent $1 million on court cases to fight the installation of air conditioning for death row inmates housed at Angola, widely considered the worst prison in America. The AP reports that " The state could spend roughly the same money — and possibly much less — on an air conditioning system that would satisfy a federal judge's order to protect death-row inmates from dangerous heat and humidity.

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