Texas Prisoners Win Victory by Filing Mass Grievances

I have some encouraging news to report concerning the grievance process here on the Jordan Unit in Texas. I am a medium custody G-4 prisoner and per the Texas Dept of Criminal Justice “Offender Orientation Handbook” (I-202) pg 32 which outlines the out-of-cell time requirements, we G-4 prisoners were being shorted our 4 hours daily requirement. We tried many different ways to rectify the problem. First we wrote the Major and then the Warden about this with no response. A group of us tried to “jack the dayroom,” meaning not racking up in our cell when told, while others protested by kicking cell doors, forcefully making our requests and issues known to the pigs. This didn’t work either, it just earned us a 24-hour lockdown.

Several of us wrote grievances periodically over the course of two months with each response being “no policy violation noted.” Finally we decided to send in “a mass grievance.” We submitted approximately fifty five to sixty grievances concerning “out of cell time” at one time. The response by the Warden was the same “no policy violations noted.” The very next day after we all received our grievances back the pigs gave us our 4 hours out of cell time.

It took us over 6 months in trying different tactics, but we finally won. Crazy to think all we won was what we were supposed to have per the rules set forth by these pigs. I would suggest to every prisoner across the state of Texas following our winning process and submit “mass grievances,” the more the better at one time. Persistence paid off in this case.

MIM(Prisons) adds: This is an encouraging report among many defeats in the grievance battle. And it is important that this comrade wrote up the tactics used so that others can learn from this. We also will stress what the comrade wrote: that all that was won is what was already set out in the rules created by the prison in the first place. We use the grievance system to try to win some improvements in conditions within the criminal injustice system. But we need to understand the limitations of this strategy and continue to educate people about the importance of dismantling the entire criminal injustice system. We can only win that battle as a part of the larger anti-imperialist fight.

(read more on the grievance victory at Jordan Unit)