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As temperatures outside the DeKalb County Jail plunged into the teens, a tragedy was unfolding inside the Georgia jail.

Lamar Walker was begging for help and slowly freezing to death, according to a federal lawsuit filed by his family.

Walker, 34, was arrested in December 2022 on charges of aggravated assault and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, according to local media. Walker, who had been detained at the jail several times before, was experiencing a mental health crisis and tried to flush his clothes down the toilet, prompting staff to confiscate his clothing, according the lawsuit.

Anticipating the cold temperatures, a jail official directed employees to provide two blankets to inmates in the coldest cells. But Walker was given no blankets and left “completely naked and agitated,” the lawsuit said.

Just eight days after his arrest, Walker was dead. Temperatures in his cell had reached 50 degrees, well below the 72 to 76 degrees required by jail policy, and an autopsy report found his cause of death was hypothermia, according to the lawsuit.

“Despite Lamar’s fragile mental health condition and his calls for help from the inhumane environment in which he was kept, none of the Defendants took any action to protect him from the cold or to prevent his discomfort and death,” the lawsuit said. “In fact, the Defendants did just the opposite – they willfully and maliciously rejected and ignored him.”

The DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office, which operates the jail, declined to comment citing pending litigation. Attorneys for the employees named in the lawsuit and Walker’s family did not respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY.

Inmates across the country have died or been hospitalized due to hypothermia, sparking lawsuits, criminal charges and watchdog reports that raise concerns about how well jails and prisons respond to the cold.

While much attention on how extreme temperatures affect inmates has focused on heat and U.S. winters are getting warmer, some research suggests climate change may also fuel more extreme winter weather, including heavy snowfall, which has the potential to knock out power in facilities with aging infrastructure and vulnerable populations.

America’s cold prison problem

Dozens of currently and formerly incarcerated people across the country have shared with researchers and media outlets their accounts of frigid showers, threadbare clothing and temperatures so low that they can see their breath inside their cells throughout the winter.

Even if a prison has a heating system, it often isn’t able to warm all parts of the facility quickly and adequately, said Ben Barron, author of a study on the climate risks to prison infrastructure in Colorado. “These buildings are not built to do anything beyond keep a population contained and controlled,” Barron said.

Many inmates told Barron’s team they had to purchase warmer clothing from the commissary. Some found makeshift ways to protect themselves from the cold, like wetting the edges of windows so they would freeze and create a seal to keep cold air out.

“It felt like because it was so cold at times in the winter that I would have every piece of clothing I had on…and also be afraid to go to sleep at night because it felt like it was so cold that I would not wake up,” one man told Barron’s team, according to the group’s report.

As the eastern United States endures a frigid February, advocates for incarcerated people are bracing for the annual influx of complaints about a lack of heating and warm clothing, problems that can be exacerbated by temporary crises like power outages during a storm. They say the conditions could be considered “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, much like the sweltering conditions in prisons without air conditioning.

“That definitely could violate the Eighth Amendment or the 14th Amendment because that’s gratuitous punishment,” said Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “Whether it’s done more out of negligence because it’s an old building or the like and so the heat’s not working versus purposefully setting it excessively cold.”

Climate change could fuel extreme winter weather

Global temperatures are rising but nowhere is getting hotter faster than the Arctic.

As the temperature difference between the Arctic and the areas further south shrinks, the jet stream, which acts as a buffer between them, gets weaker, according to Jennifer Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center. A weak jet stream could allow frigid Arctic air to plunge further south and stick around longer than usual, she said, though that theory is being debated among scientists and a causal link has not been definitively proven.

“We tend to see longer stretches of cold in the winter or longer stretches of storminess or longer stretches of abnormal heat even,” Francis said. “And we’ve seen that very clearly displayed this winter so far.”

An influx of Arctic air was responsible for a deadly Texas cold snap in February 2021, Francis said. During that winter storm, about a third of Texas prisons lost power and about the same amount of facilities had low or no running water, the Texas Tribune reported.

And while many states say their facilities have heating capabilities, they aim to keep their prisons at a certain temperature during the winter and they provide warm clothes or blankets, inmate experiences vary widely, particularly in parts of the country that are less accustomed to dealing with winter weather. A survey of 563 inmates in California found over half said they lacked access to heated facilities during extreme cold weather, according to a 2023 report from the Ella Baker Center.

“It can strike kind of anywhere,” Francis said. “So anywhere that’s not prepared for extreme cold is going to suffer more than places that are.”

How cold kills inside

Cold kills more people than heat in the U.S. and cold in prison can be particularly deadly.

A 2024 study of more than 18,000 deaths in prisons during cold months found the cumulative effect of an extreme cold day was associated with an 11% increase in mortality and a 55% increase in suicides. The greatest increase in deaths occurred in prisons built before 1980, located in the South or West, and operating as a dedicated medical facility.

“Cold-related deaths often occur on moderately cool days, not only during extreme events, and most are tied to worsening of chronic conditions rather than hypothermia itself,” Shady Abohashem, of Mass General Brigham Heart and Vascular Institute, previously told USA TODAY.

Hypothermia sets in when body temperature drops below 95 degrees. While the dangerous condition is often associated with being outside in the snow or plunging into freezing waters, it can occur indoors if the conditions are right, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

“If you’re wet, poorly nourished, or inadequately clothed on top of not having enough heat, you’ll get colder much faster – and the faster hypothermia can occur,” emergency medicine physician Thomas Waters said in a statement.

Certain medical conditions and factors like age can also make people more susceptible to the cold. Nearly 1 in 6 prisoners are 55 and older ‒ a significant increase since the turn of the century ‒ according to a report from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. 

A disproportionate number of incarcerated people also have a history of mental illness, and some research suggests certain anti-psychotic medications can raise the risk of hypothermia. In 2024, the Associated Press reported that inmates at a Virginia facility that predominantly holds mentally ill offenders were hospitalized for hypothermia at least 13 times over the course of three years.

Kyle Gibson, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Corrections, said he could not confirm that report. Gibson said four inmates at the Marion Correctional Treatment Center have been hospitalized with hypothermia since 2020 and in three cases, the hypothermia was “a symptom of another medical issue.”

Cruel and unusual punishment?

The Supreme Court has suggested that low cell temperatures combined with a failure to provide blankets could constitute an Eighth Amendment violation. Barron said the crumbling carceral infrastructure he studied regularly crossed this threshold.

“A core piece of our argument was that this amounts to cruel and unusual punishment precisely because people on the inside don’t have much agency to respond to extreme conditions,” he said.

Litigation in state courts has found extreme heat in prisons to be unconstitutional. A string of lawsuits related to hypothermia deaths in prison stretches back at least two decades, and inmates have had some success holding officials accountable for extremely cold conditions and pushing for change.

Recently, lawyers for people incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, during a weeklong blackout secured a $10 million settlement from the government. “Longstanding temperature regulation issues” resulted in “significant” problems with heat in the facility as outdoor temperatures plunged into the single digits, according to report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General.

After a watchdog report raised concerns about the deaths of two people in custody who experienced “symptoms consistent with hypothermic arrest,” the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a motion in 2023 asking jail officials to give out more thermal clothing.

But there have been setbacks, too. Former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed a bill in March that would have required heat, as well as air conditioning, be provided in state correctional facilities and that temperature be kept between 65 and 80 degrees.

“This bill imposes a costly mandate without assessing the financial and operational burdens on the Department of Corrections,” Youngkin said in a statement at the time. “Furthermore, existing Department of Corrections data does not substantiate the claims of extreme temperatures or health risks used to justify this legislation.”

Due to budget concerns, Del. Holly Seibold of Fairfax County said she’s not planning to reintroduce the legislation but is hoping to convince the department of corrections to make changes internally. At this point, Seibold said, she’d settle for just providing heavier blankets but more substantive changes are what inmates really need.

“Unless we really invest in the infrastructure of the old prisons in particular, it’s not going to change,” she said.

Contributing: Doyle Rice