At 10:30 p.m., it’s time to “rack up.” The men at the Estelle Unit in Huntsville retire to their cells and get into bed, hallway lights streaming in through cell windows. Through the walls, they can hear the occasional heavy door or gate shut, while their neighbors—despite the required quiet hours—often chat or call out from their beds, some falling asleep to radios.
At 1 a.m., the men are roused for a head count, and required to verbally identify themselves to guards. Those who fall back to sleep are woken again around 2 a.m. for breakfast.
The unit’s schedule—packed with programming, check-ins, and appointments on a 24-hour basis—leaves only three and a half hours for sleep, only two and a half uninterrupted, according to court documents in a long-running lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ).
And now the conservative U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has sided with prisoner Michael Garrett in his ongoing lawsuit that alleges TDCJ’s schedule leaves too little time for sleep.
“[N]ighttime prison conditions—namely the hallway lighting, heavy doors slamming, and prisoners yelling—further imperil inmates’ sleep prospects during this three-and-a-half-hour window,” the Fifth Circuit wrote in an opinion issued late last month.
Garrett, who has served about 30 years in TDCJ, alleges in a lawsuit he first filed 11 years ago that the schedule violates his Eighth Amendment right, which bars the state from inflicting cruel and unusual punishment. The scheduled sleep deprivation, he argues, poses a serious risk to all incarcerated peoples’ health in Texas.
“It affects every single part of people’s well-being if they are not getting sufficient sleep.”
Candice A. Alfano, director of the University of Houston’s Sleep and Anxiety Center of Houston, who served as an expert witness in an earlier stage of the case, told the Texas Observer she agrees with Garrett’s argument. “Prolonged sleep deprivation is considered a form of torture by the [United Nations] because it essentially attacks and breaks down a person’s most basic biological functions and processes,” Alfano said. “For someone with one or more underlying health condition, these effects are likely to be more rapid.”
Garrett—who according to court documents suffers from migraines, high blood pressure, and vertigo, among other health issues—began his legal battle in 2013 when he was housed at the McConnell Unit in south Texas. After he had exhausted the prison’s internal grievance process, he sued the department in an attempt to force them to allot six hours of scheduled sleep time each night.
His case went first to the Southern District of Texas in Corpus Christi. Initially Magistrate Judge B. Janice Ellington said in 2013 that Garrett had “no constitutional right to a predetermined number of hours of uninterrupted sleep” and that he would have to prove he suffered harm from sleep deprivation.
In a previous ruling in 2014, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, saying that sleep deprivation “could plausibly constitute a denial of the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities” required by the Eighth Amendment and sent the case back to the district court for further consideration. The second time, Garrett, who was representing himself, ended up in a bench trial with U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos. Ramos ruled that, because Garrett couldn’t prove that a lack of sleep caused his health concerns and that TDCJ was “wantonly” inflicting pain with its schedule, he couldn’t successfully sue.
Alfano, a sleep expert and professor at the University of Houston, testified on the dangers of sleep deprivation in that trial. She told the Observer the district court’s position disregarded widely accepted medical evidence. “There is no debate among medical experts as to the wide-ranging detrimental effects of poor sleep,” Alfano said. “So, the idea that the burden of proof falls solely on the individual in legal matters is neither reasonable nor just.”
In 2019, Garrett appealed again to the Fifth Circuit, and attorney Chris Knight took on his case. When Garrett was transferred to the Estelle Unit in 2020, the Fifth Circuit Court returned his case to the district court again to determine whether Estelle Unit’s sleep schedule was just as restrictive.
In 2022, Judge Ramos found that sleep conditions were similar at Estelle, but again said that “nothing in the evidence suggests that TDCJ is engaged in conduct designed to intentionally inflict sleep deprivation on inmates.” Instead, the state argued that it had legitimate reasons for its restrictive schedule, citing the large number of people of different security classifications who must cycle through the morning meal and routines.
Now the Fifth Circuit has stepped in to say that the lower courts had repeatedly unfairly ruled that Garrett had to prove actual harm caused by the lack of sleep. Instead, the court said, he only had to prove that the prison conditions posed a substantial risk to incarcerated people’s health.
While his legal drama continues to play out, researchers have already begun to track the risks of poor sleep to prisoners’ health.
Last October, Michele Deitch and Alycia Welch with the University of Texas Prison and Jail Innovation Lab gave a presentation to the International Corrections and Prisons Association on the harmful sleeping conditions in prisons. There, they previewed findings from a forthcoming report entitled, “The Nightmare of Sleep in Prison.” Among their recommendations: increasing dedicated sleep time. They define a healthy amount as at least four 90-minute cycles of uninterrupted sleep, or at least six hours.
Impaired sleep, they reported, endangers incarcerated people’s health, increasing risks associated with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and mental illnesses. It also can make prisons more dangerous, as a lack of sleep can reduce impulse control, increase irritability, and impair judgment.
In an interview, Deitch told the Observer that formerly incarcerated people regularly tell her their sleep patterns have been permanently altered by their prison time. She said poor sleeping conditions like the ones described in Garrett’s suit are “not unusual”.
“It affects every single part of people’s well-being if they are not getting sufficient sleep,” Deitch said. “That’s true if it happens for a day or two. When you’re in prison, this is every single day for years on end. And that has such a cumulative impact on someone’s health.”
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