Clemens Grievance System Fails but TDCJ Headquarters Investigates Complaints

As far as your comment about the Grievance System, well, I gave up on the system a while back. What I do is I will write a letter and address it to Brad Livingston, Executive Director of TDCJ, or Ombudsman, etc. whomever I need it to go to, then I will mail it to my family members and have them email or fax a copy of the letter to whomeever I addressed. That way I get a chance to explain my problem myself. Thus far, it appears that Huntsville (headquarters for TDCJ) has investigated each complaint that I have sent in. I know that not everyone is able to do this, because not everyone has someone on the outside.

Here at the Clemens Unit, some of the problems that I have been working on are:

1. The state will not treat me for periodontal disease
2. The laundry department here will not give us clean clothes (uniforms) on the weekends, or on holidays. This time of year, we sweat through our uniform every time we go to the chow hall. After sweating in the same clothes for three days, they smell pretty bad. However, Capt. Teenha Walls would rather not let us have clean clothes, and save the state a few dollars.
3. There are not enough fans in the chow hall, or in the day room.
4. The maximum capacity for our day room is 64 people, but there is between 82 to 92 people in our section. So every time that we have lunch, supper, or church, or commissary, our day room is so over crowded that the rank will rack us up because people do not have anywhere to sit.
5. We have antique doors here that roll manually. People are always getting caught in the doors. People have lost limbs, because the state is too cheap to install the conversion kit simply because it is safer.
6. TDCJ staff is notorious for not giving us our engress and egress that policy says that we are supposed to get. The standard operating procedure here is to falsify state records.
7. The light fixture in my cell has not worked for three months, but maintenance will not fix it.
8. We are supposed to get rec three times a day, but we are lucky to get it once. Then most of the rec equipment is broken, but rank here will not fix it.
9. We are allowed to go to commissary once every two weeks and spend $95, but we are supposed to put all of our property in a two cubic foot locker. It is impossible to put $35 worth of commissary in that space, much less $95, and all of our other property. Insufficient storage space.
10. The other day two inmates got into a fight. They were put in lock-up, and the whole wing got locked down. The guys were fighting in the chow hall. Why did the wing get locked down? We didn’t have anything to do with it. The state uses blanket punishment to promote inmate on inmate conflict.
11. The rank here runs showers starting at about 5:45am. Then we are not allowed to shower after we go to rec.
12. In the chow hall our trays, cups and spoons are filthy with food residue from previous use.
13. We have officers that assault inmates then the rank covers it up.
14. When we get johnnies, we get two sandwiches. One of them has a tablespoon of some kind of meat. The other has a tablespoon of peanut butter and jelly mixed. That is not enough food for a grown adult.
15. By policy, we are supposed to get twenty minutes to eat, but the staff here barely gives us three minutes.

These are problems that I continue to write Brad Livingston about. Sometimes it takes a while to get something done, but you just have to keep on.