For nearly three decades, I’ve been hearing people scream for help. Screams of people being raped, robbed, stabbed. Screams of people left freezing in paper gowns in a suicide watch cell. Screams of people simply forgotten about behind these concrete walls. Prisons are filled with people screaming, but there’s no one besides us to hear them.
We lose many rights in prison, but legally we still have basic civil rights like protection from abuse. And when we suffer abuse anyway, we have the right to seek justice through the courts. But under the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, we can’t access the courts straightaway like you can in the free world. First we have to go through the grievance process.
Grievances are supposed to give us a means of advocating for ourselves. When you file a grievance, the supervisor responsible for the alleged issue will have an opportunity to resolve it. If you don’t think that the resolution was enough, a hearing will be scheduled and the warden will decide whether or not the resolution was enough. To appeal the warden’s decision, you can escalate to the department of corrections commissioner; their verdict is final. After you’ve done all that, then you’re allowed to begin accessing the courts. A process which often requires significant labor, money and legal expertise.
But most grievances are never actually processed into the system to begin with, and can easily cause more harm than good.
I’ve been incarcerated in nine Tennessee prisons over the course of my sentence, and at one of them I worked as a grievance clerk. For four years, my job was basically to send back the grievances people had submitted, rather than filing them. On an average day we’d get around 20 grievances, and file one at most.
“The unit manager called me into her office and asked if I wanted to be moved to another unit—one that was known for violence. I took the grievance back.”
The grievance process is designed in a way that makes it easy to say something was improperly submitted. A grievance won’t be filed if you describe more than one incident, but you also can’t file more than one grievance about the same incident. A grievance can be rejected for not including all the right names and dates and times, or the handwriting not being neat enough. They have to be filed within a certain time window from whenever the incident occurred; seven days is common for most complaints, though Title VI violations have their own process. In my experience, the vast majority of rejected grievances are never resubmitted.
Kendrick*, in his fifties and incarcerated for eight years, told Filter he once submitted a grievance because a unit officer was having a prisoner deliver the mail. This is not allowed for a number of reasons: Someone could throw away your mail, or keep it, or write down your loved ones’ addresses before they deliver it.
“The unit manager called me into her office and asked if I wanted to be moved to another unit—one that was known for violence,” Kendrick said. “I took the grievance back.”
Submitting a grievance immediately exposes you to retaliation. If you make allegations against a staff member, that staff member is going to hear about it—even though the grievance likely didn’t make it into the system. One potential consequence is being transferred to a facility where living conditions are worse, such as a private prison like the one where I’m currently incarcerated.
“The reason I’m at this prison is because I filed a grievance on an officer who broke my TV while doing a cell search,” Marcus*, in his forties and incarcerated for 14 years, told Filter. “He dropped it on the floor. I filed a grievance, and in less than a week I was transferred to this hell hole.”
Protection from property damage is a right we retain in prison, but that often doesn’t matter.
The grievance forms contain a useful template: Give a brief description of the problem, and propose a solution.
Some grievances have a straightforward purpose, like replacing a TV. But many are often submitted out of resentment, indignation or a desire to complain. Those very well may be justified, but if the grievance is more about airing those feelings than proposing a realistic solution, then it’s more likely to make the situation worse than to make it better. We’re especially vulnerable to this kind of thinking when we don’t have an outlet for talking about and processing the trauma of prison.
When I began my sentence, I would try to shield my family from all knowledge of the violence I was witnessing and being subjected to. It’s a common experience shared by many of us insiders—feeling that our loved ones have endured enough devastation on our account, and that by sharing the realities of prison life we’d just be burdening them even more.
“My parents visit me about once a month,” Connor*, in his twenties and incarcerated for four years, told Filter. “After a few years in, I went to visit with a black eye. My mother teared up and begged me to tell her what happened. For the first time I unloaded all the shit that went down.”
Connor’s parents hugged him and thanked him for letting them in. They then took the information to prison officials and began advocating for him from the outside.
The purpose of the grievance process is to make sure that the abuses we endure every day inside prisons rarely reach the outside world. But the forms themselves contain a useful template for how to advocate for ourselves: Give a brief description of the problem, and propose a solution.
The level of constant abuse in prison can be overwhelming, as can the isolation. It often fills us with the urge to scream simply because as humans we have a need to be heard. But feelings of anger and injustice do not in and of themselves mean we must bring something to light. The time for that is when we know what we want to do about it.
No matter how reasonable and actionable the proposed solution, any grievance is a risk. But many are risks worth taking. As a nation we have normalized and become numb to the horrors of prisons, and yet most of those horrors are hidden from the public. If prisoners don’t bring them to light ourselves, then no one will.
*Names have been changed for sources’ protection.
Screenshot (cropped) by Washington State Department of Corrections via YouTube
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