PBS News Hour

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Tonight on PBS News Weekend, as the country navigates the extreme heat, many incarcerated Americans are suffering through the scorching temperatures with little or no air conditioning.

MAN: Anyone outside of prison can go outside and catch a breeze.

They have more access to water.

They're not literally living day to day, hour by hour in these cells of buildings made out of stone and concrete that are really heating up like ovens.

JOHN YANG: Then why millions of Americans are living in areas without easy access to an ambulance.

And we get a bird's eye view of falconry the ancient sport of hunting game with birds of prey.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Good evening, I'm John Yang.

Across the South and West new all-time heat records could be set as forecasters say the week's long heatwave is entering its most intense phase.

The forecast high in Las Vegas was 117 degrees.

That's the hottest temperature ever recorded there.

Nearly a third of all Americans are under heat advisories, watches and warnings.

For some areas the heat wave has been unrelenting.

Phoenix, Arizona has seen 16 straight days with highs over 110 and is on track to beat the record of 18 days.

El Paso, Texas has set highs above 104 a month.

There's also a record setting heat in the waters of Florida reaching the mid-90s.

Not only does it make it harder for people to cool off, scientists warn of coral bleaching, fish kills and algae blooms and the warm waters could fuel tropical storms come hurricane season.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was taken to a hospital near Tel Aviv earlier today after feeling dizzy at his home.

Doctors say it was likely dehydration.

And a video from the hospital, Netanyahu said he felt very good and that he and his wife visited the Sea of Galilee yesterday without a hat or water.

Not a good idea, he said.

The 73-year-old Prime Minister who's facing mounting Israeli anger over his bid to overhaul the judicial system is expected to remain in the hospital for more tests.

In South Korea, at least 26 people are dead and 10 missing after days of torrential rain triggered landslides and flooding.

Rescue workers are searching for people and houses buried by mud.

More than 5,000 people have evacuated their homes and tens of thousands of homes are without electricity.

Rains in the forecast for some parts of the country through Sunday.

South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol is making a surprise visit to Ukraine today.

Yoon pledged $150 million in humanitarian aid and as promised more non-lethal military supplies like body armor and helmets.

South Korea is a major arms exporter but has not sent any weapons to Ukraine, citing its long standing policy of not arming nations while they're at war.

And at Wimbledon today Marketa Vondrousova, the Czech Republic, became the first ever unseated woman to win the single championship.

Vondrousova upset Ons Jabeur of Tunisia, she was the number six seed.

Vondrousova did it in two sets to win her first Grand Slam title.

She began the tournament ranked 42 in the world and beat to top 10 players at Wimbledon Still to come on PBS News Weekend but dangerous of living in an ambulance desert and a look at falconry one of the world's oldest sports.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: The extreme heat that scorching much of the country this summer is particularly brutal for prisoners and the guards who watch over them.

By one count 44 states don't have air conditioning in all their prisons.

10 of those states are in the south with a heatwave has been unrelenting.

In Mississippi, the Justice Department cited temperatures as high as 145 in the state penitentiary as among the conditions that violated prisoner's constitutional rights.

After the Justice Department issued its findings last year, Mississippi began installing air conditioning.

And in Texas, more than two-thirds of prisoner living areas lack air conditioning.

We spoke with people who either have been inmates in Texas prisons or have family members who are currently in prison there to learn more about what it's like to live through extreme heat behind bars.

MARCI MARIE SIMMONS: I spent over a decade in the Texas prison.

I've been home for about two years.

NORMA BUENTROSTRO: He's the youngest of my sons.

He is serving a 15 year sentence in Texas.

JASON CRAWFORD: I spent just over 14 years in the Texas Prison System.

BRITTANY POKORSKI: I work in prison for a total of 11 years.

DELIA ANNMARIE: I was incarcerated 17 years in Texas prisons.

BRITTANY POKORSKI: I would say the heat was like being suffocated, like took your breath away.

MARCI MARIE SIMMONS: That's very easy to kind of give into that a pressing need and almost frankly, forget to breathe.

JASON CRAWFORD: I would be so hot that my vision would blur.

I couldn't hear for some reason.

I would flood the toilet.

And I would lay in about an inch of cold running water with my band propped over me.

SAMANTHA WOODS: My daughter has been there seven years.

She has nine months to go.

And she's sweating profusely all the time.

Can't sleep.

She works in the kitchen.

So you know, it's like 120, 130 degrees in there and people or fainting people are seizing and falling on the floor.

MARCI MARIE SIMMONS: Heat related seizures are very common in the summer months in prison.

And I don't mean common like one a day.

I mean common like three or four a day.

I saw when I was incarcerated.

BRITTANY POKORSKI: I had a really bad seizure.

And I had hit my head really hard.

And I still just couldn't I couldn't bring my temperature down.

I was vomiting and diarrhea.

I thought I was on die that day.

JASON CRAWFORD: A guard had come in to sit with us.

He passed out in the pot from being so hot and having that best and having the uniform on.

He started to seize.

DELIA ANNMARIE: We had one inmate pass away from a heat stroke, because they were not allowing us to have our fans.

SAMANTHA WOODS: There's mediocre air-conditioning, so as an opportunity when I visit her that she can actually be in semi-air conditioning for two hours.

NORMA BUENTROSTRO: In a metal building, you're talking about maybe 120, 130 degrees or even higher, is inhumane.

I -- my heart aches when I see him connect to him.

Because it is -- I can't.

I can't help him.

JOHN YANG: Earlier this year, an effort to include money for prison air-conditioning and the next budget in Texas failed in the State Senate.

Maurice Chammah writes for the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on the criminal justice system.

Maurice, I know you took a deep dive into this topic.

You did a documentary with the Weather Channel about it a few years back.

You've talked to a lot of people around the country, you've talked to a lot of people in Texas, is what we just heard unusual compared to what you heard from others.

MAURICE CHAMMAH, The Marshall Project: No, it's very in line with what is happening in prisons across the south.

You get reports from incarcerated people that it is just an elemental struggle to survive and that increasing number just don't make it.

So there was an epidemiological study in Texas that found that about 14 deaths a year could be attributed to the higher heat.

Often it is hard to pinpoint that a particular death is because of the heat.

Sometimes it scans as a heart attack or stroke.

But we know that frequently, the underlying cause this sort of strain on the body that led to some of these deaths comes from that summer heat.

JOHN YANG: We reached out to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and they provided us a statement from their director of communications says in part, much like those Texans who do not have access to air conditioning in their homes, the department uses an array of measures to keep inmates safe.

The agency recognizes that some inmates are potentially at a heightened risk of heat related illnesses because of their age, health conditions or medications.

These individuals are identified through an automated heat sensitivity score that uses information from the inmates electronic health record.

Individuals who have a heat sensitivity score, receive priority placement in a housing area that is air conditioned.

So there they're talking about prisoner's health conditions, but you also say that a growing segment of the population is becoming more sensitive to heat.

MAURICE CHAMMAH: Well, I should say that many of those measures the Texas prison system took were only in response to lawsuits that were brought by prisoners and their families after a wave of deaths and other medical issues.

There are a number of prisoners who are especially susceptible to summer heat, you know, we pass laws in the 80s and 90s, that sent more and more people to prison for longer and longer sentences.

And that means that we're dealing with the reality of people in their 60s and 70s, who just have less of a physical ability, just like 16, 17-year olds in the free world to really deal with the heat on in the hottest months.

And then on top of that you have a lot of prisoners who are suffering from mental illnesses.

And we know that psychotropic drugs sort of depresses the body's ability to deal with heat.

So you've got a heat index of 120, 130 degrees in there, people desperately go off their psychotropic medications, and that can make them more dangerous to other prisoners or the staff.

You see a rise in suicides.

And then you also just see more and more corrections officers either take off work because they've had some kind of heat related illness, or just quit or not take the job in the first place.

JOHN YANG: Why are there so many prisons without air conditioning?

MAURICE CHAMMAH: I think the issue is essentially political there.

Since the 1970s.

And 80s.

There was this understanding that you know, many Americans don't have air conditioning.

But what I think policymakers and the public didn't realize is that even anyone outside of prison can go outside and catch a breeze, they have more access to water, they're not literally living day to day, hour by hour in these cells of buildings made out of stone and concrete that are really heating up like ovens, much more so than even your typical house.

JOHN YANG: What does this say about how we treat prisoners in the United States?

MAURICE CHAMMAH: Well, it says that we're still tremendously unsympathetic to them.

I mean, there's been a lot of talk of criminal justice reform over the last 5, 10 years.

But you still see, not just in southern states, but certainly in them.

There is a -- an idea still that prisoners are sort of the castaways of society who have put themselves there, even though we know that, you know, many people are wrongfully convicted or are sentenced to really, really long sentences for I think what most people would consider fairly low level crimes.

This lack of sympathy and mercy, I think, is still very much with us from the 1980s and 90s.

And I think you see it in this continuing unwillingness among policymakers to install air conditioning and reduce the likelihood that prisoners are going to have strokes and even die each summer.

JOHN YANG: As we've said, this also affects corrections officers and other people who work in these prisons, it actually becomes sort of a labor issue or workplace conditions issue.

Are states and prisons more receptive to them than they are to prisoners?

MAURICE CHAMMAH: I mean, in theory, but Texas right still does not have air conditioning, even though many corrections officers have been asking for it.

And even though they have said that the shortage of guards, the inability of the state to hire people to work in prisons is partially attributable just to the fact that people don't want to spend their work day in these conditions if they can avoid it.

Part of that is that they don't want to live through the heat, but part of it is also the corrections officers don't want to live with the increased levels of violence of suicide and other problems that are in a prison during these hottest summer months.

JOHN YANG: Maurice Chammah of the Marshall Project.

Thank you very much.

MAURICE CHAMMAH: Thanks for having me.

JOHN YANG: When people call 911, they expect an ambulance to respond quickly and deliver medical care.

But nearly four and a half million Americans live in what's known as ambulance deserts in a medical crisis, they have to wait as long as 25 minutes or even longer for an emergency medical crew to arrive.

Ali Rogin tells us what's causing these shortages and what's at stake for people who live in these ambulance deserts.

ALI ROGIN: In medical emergencies, getting swift transportation to a hospital can mean the difference between life and death.

But with a limited number of ambulances to dispatch some states are struggling to meet that need.

Nick Nudell is the president of The American Paramedic Association and spent almost 20 years as a paramedic in Montana and California.

Nick, thank you so much for joining us.

Can you first just describe to us what the emergency medical services industry in this country looks like?

NICK NUDELL, President, American Paramedic Association: The EMS industry is comprised of a number of different elements, and can be provided by government agencies or private companies, and in some cases is also provided by hospitals that operate an ambulance service.

In many rural areas of this country the ambulance service is provided by unpaid volunteers from the community.

So it's really depending on the availability of community members to provide that voluntary service.

And so, if you're in an even more rural or more remote area, you may have to wait quite a while for an ambulance to be able to get to an emergency, if you have one.

ALI ROGIN: Has the situation always been this bad in terms of the lack of volunteers, and the difficulty that people have accessing these emergency ambulance services when they need them?

NICK NUDELL: No, I don't think it always has been as bad as it is today.

Over the past couple of decades, there has been a strong decline in the number of people available to be providing voluntary services in rural communities.

So because of that there are fewer and fewer people who are available to replace the older volunteers who in many cases are now approaching their 60s or 70s and still volunteering.

But we know that that can't last for very much longer.

ALI ROGIN: Nick, you yourself worked as a paramedic for over 20 years, can you describe the human toll put upon these workers when they're having to meet this overwhelming need?

NICK NUDELL: Yeah, the rural EMTs and paramedics that especially those that volunteer giving up their time, their family time, they have many missed birthdays, and celebrations and just really have to dedicate a lot of their own personal time in order to provide the service on top of all of their other responsibilities.

And that has a great toll on them personally, and that's why so many of them continued to do it for decades, because it's difficult to find somebody to replace them.

ALI ROGIN: There are only a few states that designate EMS services as an essential service.

And it seems like that is coupled with low salary rates for a lot of these jobs.

What other factors are involved in there simply not being enough people to do these jobs.

NICK NUDELL: With elected officials really just kind of kicking the can down the road and not owning the problem of funding.

That leaves the service provision to the volunteers and other community members who often have bake sales or spaghetti sales or other kinds of local fundraising efforts to pay for the fuel or to buy ambulances if EMS was declared as an essential service.

And then real effort was put into finding funding mechanisms that would be sustainable for providing the service that would go a long ways towards being able to support the rural ambulance services especially and could address the ambulance desert issue.

ALI ROGIN: And what is the federal government doing to address this issue?

Are they doing anything?

And what do you think they should be doing?

NICK NUDELL: The federal government recently did declared EMS as an essential service along with all of the grocery store workers and truck drivers and many other essential occupations during the COVID pandemic, that declaration really kind of faded with the ending of the pandemic.

ALI ROGIN: Tell us about how the way that the United States does Emergency Medical Services differs from other countries?

NICK NUDELL: Well, in the United States, because it's not an essential service being provided by the government, like it is in other countries, we have somewhere on the order of 22,000 Ambulance Services, you could contrast that with Australia, with 10 states, they have 10 Ambulance Services.

And so it's much easier for the government to provide that level of service when there's fewer organizations and people involved.

And so it's a much more efficient system.

And they're able to provide better care for their entire country, where here we have so many services that it's difficult to provide that same level of service across our country.

ALI ROGIN: And in fact, you found places where there's a great concentration of ambulances, in fact, even more than are necessary for the population that surrounds them.

NICK NUDELL: Yeah, that's right.

We did look at one state, the state of North Dakota, and we were able to determine that they had more than enough ambulance services to provide for the entire state to have no ambulance deserts, but it would require moving where those ambulances are to help provide better coverage.

So, I assumed that that's going to be the case in other locations to where really if you were able to take that systematized approach, instead of having a patchwork approach, you can provide all the services needed so it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be more expensive.

ALI ROGIN: Nick Nudell, the president of the American Paramedic Association.

Thank you so much for joining us on this important issue.

NICK NUDELL: Well, thank you very much.

JOHN YANG: Finally, tonight, a story of a different kind of hunting sport, falconry, considered to be the oldest sport known demand falconers train their birds of prey to hunt game.

But as Pamela Watts of Rhode Island PBS reports, it's also a chance to help preserve these noble creatures of the skies.

JIM GWIAZDZINSKI, Master Falconer: Working with these birds and hunting with them, you're truly one with nature.

You're really interacting with them and it's hands on, you know, it's not something that you're observing.

You're a part of it.

PAMELA WATTS: Jim Gwiazdzinski of Westerly Rhode Island has been hunting with birds of prey for 27 years.

He is a master Falconer currently training this Raptor.

JIM GWIAZDZINSKI: I think that you know what the bond that you share with these birds is pretty magnificent.

They're not pets, the sport itself, I mean, where it brings you are some beautiful places in beautiful habitat.

PAMELA WATTS: Falconry or Hawking is training Raptors to hunt game with you.

Witnessing their majestic flight, you understand why it was crowned the sport of kings.

Its origins date back centuries to the Middle East, eventually migrating to medieval Europe.

It remained popular as a form of hunting until the introduction of guns.

Today Falconry is a specialized sport similar to fly fishing.

JIM GWIAZDZINSKI: There is an art to it to falconry and there is a finesse to it.

PAMELA WATTS: Originally what was the object of falconry?

JIM GWIAZDZINSKI: It was point fact to put food on the table, especially prior to the invention of firearms.

PAMELA WATTS: What about today?

JIM GWIAZDZINSKI: The same.

I, you know, I'll be the first to admit I've eaten rabbit, I've eaten squirrel.

PAMELA WATTS: So you can't be squeamish to participate in this sport?

JIM GWIAZDZINSKI: You can't.

You can't.

No, you can't.

I mean it is a hunting sport.

PAMELA WATTS: It all starts with capturing the bird of prey.

Gwiazdzinski says he either has to climb to a nest to get a hatchling or catch an immature bird in a special net.

You understand that there are going to be people who find this objectionable that you're taking hatchlings from the nest or, you know, trapping a wild bird.

How do you answer that?

JIM GWIAZDZINSKI: I say that is sure, you know, I can get that point of view.

I think if they understood the amount of time and energy and enthusiasm but care that we have for these birds about 75 to 80 percent do not make it through their first year.

So as falconers were allowed to trap these immature raptors, and we leave the actual mature birds alone.

PAMELA WATTS: So you see yourselves as conservationists?

JIM GWIAZDZINSKI: I do.

It was truly Falconers that had a lot to do with the thrust and the push to get peregrine falcons off the endangered species list.

PAMELA WATTS: Saved from extinction they came off the endangered list in 1999.

The U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service gave limited allocations to each region for hunting.

In 2022, this creature became the first peregrine falcon permitted to be captured in Rhode Island.

Her species is considered the most prized of hunting birds.

Other raptors are also used for hunting such as this Kestrel, the smallest of Falcons also Merlin's goshawks Cooper's hawks, and especially red tail Hawks.

Gwiazdzinski says training begins with food based reward and getting the predator to eat from your hand.

JIM GWIAZDZINSKI: You're trying to establish a trust with a bird.

And then what you do is you put the bird on a perch, say a few feet away, and you start to incorporate the whistle and you whistle and get the bird to jump, you know, take a little bit of a flight out you.

They land on the glove.

You give them the tidbit, you put them back and then you walk further away.

And essentially you're getting the bird to fly to you farther and farther away.

PAMELA WATTS: When the Raptors are released to nearby trees, falconers go into the woods, literally beating the bushes with sticks to get their quarry to move.

And if an animal is spotted, say a rabbit.

The hunter gives a distinct call, to alert the bird to their target.

JIM GWIAZDZINSKI: What they're starting to do is there they make the connection between, you know, something going, something rotting and the falconer.

PAMELA WATTS: After all this training, most of these birds of prey will be released back to the wild after just a few seasons.

Gwiazdzinski says the sport is a commitment year round.

JIM GWIAZDZINSKI: It goes beyond a hobby, it's a passion.

It really is a lifestyle.

It's there's a lot that goes into it.

You know, these birds are cared for every day.

It's not passing fancy and it's certainly something that you just can't you know put on a shelf and forget about.

PAMELA WATTS: For these falconers spending a day with their sky hunters defies description.

JIM GWIAZDZINSKI: The world tends to, you know, melt away so it's truly a great escape.

You know you're so focused on the bird, you're no longer focused on yourself or the trials and tribulations, you know, that can inundate us, you know from day to day PAMELA WATTS: For PBS News Weekend, I'm Pamela watts in Jamestown, Rhode Island.

JOHN YANG: And a news update before we go, police in Georgia are looking for a man they believe fatally shot four people this morning in Hampton, Georgia, a small city south of Atlanta.

The Henry County Sheriff's Office released a photo of the suspect whom they have identified as Andre Longmore.

And that is PBS News Weekend for this Saturday.

I'm John Yang.

For all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

See you tomorrow.

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