Grievance Campaign Update in Colorado

I have received a response from the Warden - Ms. Susan Jones - who was only temporary (we’ve had three wardens in the last 6 months here at Fremont Correctional Facility) and it was a two paragraph “toe-the-CDOC-company-line” statement of how CDOC has a solid policy for grievances and all are addressed all the time. Basically a complete lie, as it did not raise serious awareness for our issues here at FCF.

However, there have been at least 30 inmates who filed the Colorado Petition that I know of for a fact, and only a few of us actually got a response, the identical B$ response that CDOC is doing the legally right thing, BLAH BLAH, BLAH, and that these matters have been addressed. Well, they literally have done nothing, and now with another new warden, all petitions were also reported to the U.S. Attorney General’s Office as per the petition design, so at least somebody outside Colorado’s corrupt system got the same message. I have not received a response from them, nor has anyone here that I know of.

MIM(Prisons) adds: This comrade is building off the grievance campaign that is spreading across the country. The petition for Colorado was designed for exactly the situation described here: prison administration ignoring prisoner’s grievances while pretending they are following policy.

This campaign is part of the United Struggle from Within organizing work to gain some basic protections for prisoner’s legal rights. We know that under the existing criminal injustice system we will never have broad sweeping change. But as long as we live in a bourgeois democracy, and not a fascist state, we can win battles holding employees of the state to their own rules. And the rights won through grievances create space for prisoners to organize and build the anti-imperialist movement. Write to us for a copy of the petition in your state, or to create one if it doesn’t exist.