In the summer of 2023, he suffered a stroke in a Texas prison cell that court documents say regularly exceeded 110 degrees. If there were ever a person the state should flag as vulnerable to extreme heat, it’s him. Here’s what the heat score is actually supposed to do: It’s a legacy of Cole v. Collier, the litigation over conditions at the Wallace Pack Unit that settled in 2018. A score gets you “priority placement” for one of the prison system’s roughly 52,000 air-conditioned “cool beds.” That’s the real function of the heat score.