A federal judge is ordering Texas prison officials to stop forcing inmates to drink water laced with dangerous levels of arsenic.

by Brett Shipp

NAVASOTA, TEXAS (WFAA) - The cancer-causing chemical has been found in the water at one Texas prison for the past 10 years. Yet, according to the judge, state prison officials have done little or nothing to make the water safe.

WFAA-TV has previously reported conditions in Texas prisons is so bad, they’ve been put on a United Nations watch list.

When they built the Wallace Pack Unit in Navasota, Texas, in 1983, state officials chose not to provide inmates with air conditioning. In fact, only a few of the state prisons in Texas are air-conditioned.

“It’s like you can’t breathe at all,” said Keith Cole, an inmate at the Pack Unit. “You feel like you are suffocating all the time — especially when it’s extremely hot.”

Ray Wilson, a former Pack Unit inmate now living in Conroe, recalls the perils of having to deal with the summer heat without air conditioning.

“There were people lying on the floors with wet t-shirts in order to cool themselves off,” Wilson said. “When you opened up a window, all you got was a jet blast of air coming through, hot air coming in.”

Both Cole and Wilson are plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging Texas’s prisons violated the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

Their attorney, Jeff Edwards of Austin, has filed several such lawsuits against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice over what he calls inhumane and deadly conditions.

“It’s in the Constitution – you do not have the right to treat someone in a cruel and unusual manner,” Edwards said. ”What’s unusual about exposing someone to period of extreme heat is that you can kill them.”

But according to former inmate Wilson, fellow inmates are caught in a health trap.

“The philosophy was, if the heat don’t get you, the arsenic will,” Wilson said.

While it may sound like a joke, it is anything but.

According to their federal lawsuit, inmates at the Pack Unit are encouraged to drink two gallons a water a day on extremely hot days.

But the well water that supplies the prison contains levels of arsenic, a known carcinogen, higher than what the federal government allows for drinking water.