The Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance held a candlelight vigil to raise awareness for unsafe conditions in prison. Partnering with the Texas Statewide Leadership Council, individuals gathered at Raby Park in Gatesville at 8 to honor those who have lost their lives due to heat-related causes and to stand with those who they believe are suffering.

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It’s a quiet morning in Houston as Rae Hoppe works remotely at home. As she types, she can’t help but think of her boyfriend, Charles Gholson, who’s in prison without air conditioning. “I think it’s inhumane,” Hoppe said. Hoppe is worried her partner will die during the heat wave. She says he wakes up in a puddle of sweat on a hot metal bed. 

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Family members and advocates of inmates incarcerated inside Texas state prisons, rallied on Tuesday in Austin demanding lawmakers add AC to all their facilities. “If Texas is pro-life, this should be a priority. We have lives that are in our hands and families are trusting the state of Texas their loved ones will make it home,” Maggie Luna with the Texas Center for Justice and Equity said.

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Last month, a woman died. What I know was only what guards told me after I saw the reflection of the ambulance lights, she complained of chest pains. Guards at Lane Murray Unit, a prison in Texas where I am also incarcerated, took her to medical twice and each time returned her to her bunk in the general population dorm. When the guards came to take her a third time, they found her dead.

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Five years since her release, Maggie Luna has kept the mail she received from family during her two stints in Texas state prisons: drawings from her daughter, a letter from her niece, prayer cards from her mother. “It was something that I was able to open up while I was in prison and just be able to escape for a minute,” she says. But under a new program launching in some Texas facilities this week, prison mail is about to become less personal, as prisoners will no longer be allowed to receive any physical mail from loved ones.

Dallas County Commissioners and their juvenile department are set to go to court following months of tension over access to records that could show if children at the county detention center are kept in isolation for most of the day. An initial hearing is scheduled for July 26 at 10 a.m. in Civil District Judge Eric Moyé's courtroom, where he will decide if county commissioners can receive subpoenaed records from the Dallas County Juvenile Department, according to court filings.

In September 2020, Fort Bend ISD officials placed black tiles on each of the graves of the Sugar Land 95, which the district uncovered two years earlier during construction of a school. The tiles read “Unknown No. 1,” “Unknown No. 2,” and so on.

Mark Halstead remembers the last time he was outside. The 17-year-old, being held at Dallas’ Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center while waiting for his reckless driving case to be resolved, was allowed to walk outside one day in February with other kids to visit a mobile dentist. As they waited for their dental exams, he tried to get a glimpse of what was around the beige brick building.

In Texas’ state jails, the inmates are sentenced to just two years or less. But every summer, former inmate Maggie Luna remembers, the women inside worried their short sentences may take their life. “All of these women that were suffering with me had not a lot of time, and they feared that they were getting death sentences,” she said. “Several times I told my mom, ‘I hope I make it out of here.'”

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Harris County Commissioners Court this week approved a package of public safety measures to support state legislation to create additional district courts, expand the county's holistic assistance response team program and look at enlarging the public defender's office. The measures are aimed at ongoing efforts to reduce the ongoing backlog in the county's criminal courts system and relieve persistent jail overcrowding.