Document Library

Codebook

Starter themes

The themes used to tag this library. They work as first codes for interviews or documents; add your own as they come up. The last column counts library items tagged with each.

Code	Theme	What it covers	Items
heat	Heat	Indoor or outdoor heat; heat illness; how hot spaces get and when.	22
cold	Cold	Cold cells, heating failures, ice inside, winter clothing and bedding.	8
air	Air and smoke	Ventilation, recirculated air, wildfire smoke, filters, dust.	6
water	Water	Drinking water, showers, ice, outages, leaks.	7
coping	Coping and its limits	Fans, clothing, wet towels, floors and toilets used to cool down; what the rules allow.	4
punishment	Coping punished	Write-ups, segregation or loss of property for trying to stay cool or warm.	2
grievance	Speaking up	Grievances, complaints, fear of retaliation, exhaustion rules.	7
infrastructure	Buildings and systems	Age, HVAC, boilers, chillers, repair backlogs, design.	12
emergency	Emergencies	Evacuations, outages, fires, floods, and defend-in-place.	9
health	Health	Medications, chronic illness, mental health, death and injury.	4
policy	Rules and policy	Written rules, laws, standards, and how they are applied.	14
climate	Climate	Warming trends, projections, hot days.	2
method	Methods	Ways to study conditions inside, including participatory and spatial methods.	2

Interview guide

Starter questions

A starting point for semi-structured interviews with people who were incarcerated. Adapt it with your ethics board and with people who lived it before you use it.

01 · Opening

Tell me about the facilities you were in and roughly when.
What was a normal summer day like where you lived? A normal winter day?

02 · Spaces

Which spaces were hottest or coldest: cell, dayroom, kitchen, workshop, yard, solitary, transport?
If you drew your cell, where did the air come in, and where did the heat or cold build up?

03 · Systems

What cooling or heating did you notice: AC, swamp coolers, fans, vents, windows?
Did it change by date, by time of day, by lockdown?

04 · Rules and coping

What did you do to cool down or stay warm? What were you allowed to do?
Did anyone get in trouble for trying to stay cool or warm? What happened?

05 · Health

How did heat or cold affect your body, sleep, mood or medications?
Did you or someone you knew need medical help because of heat or cold?

06 · Speaking up

Did you or others file grievances about temperature or water? What happened?
What kept people from speaking up?

07 · Closing

If you could change one thing about how prisons handle heat and cold, what would it be?
Is there anything I didn't ask that I should have?

Before you interview

Get informed consent in plain words. Let people skip any question. Don't record facility staff names or details that could identify someone still inside. Offer to share findings back. Pay people for their time when you can.

Tools

Software for coding and archiving

Free tools are enough to start. Paid ones help when a team codes together.

Tool	Cost	Good for
Zotero	Free	Save, tag and cite every source. A shared group library lets a team build one reference list.
Taguette	Free, open source	Highlight and code interview transcripts in a browser; export codes to a spreadsheet.
QualCoder	Free, open source	Coding for text, images, audio and video on your own computer.
Omeka	Free, open source	Build a public archive of documents, images and oral histories with consent notes.
Dedoose	Paid, monthly	Team coding in the browser, with mixed-methods charts.
NVivo or ATLAS.ti	Paid	Full qualitative analysis suites, common in universities; check your campus license.

Data and methods Research Hub State heat rules