Upon reading ULK 46 I was once again reminded of the difficulties
that us prisoners face trying to have our grievances heard. I would like
to share with ULK readers a remedy for this issue that I have
discovered.
Pursuant to Powe v. Ennis, 177 F.3d 393 (5th Circuit 1999); and
Lewis v. Washington, 300 F.3d 829 (7th Cir. 2002), if prison
officials refuse to hear your grievance, your administrative remedies
are exhausted. You do not need a response to your grievance to pursue
your issue in the courts. You need only prove that you filed the
respective grievance.
This can easily be done. First, after you have written your grievance
fill out a Proof of Service form stating that on such-and-such date you
sent so-and-so a grievance regarding such-and-such issue. After you have
filled out the Proof of Service form get it notarized at your facility’s
law library. Secondly make sure to make copies of both your grievance
and the Proof of Service form to keep in your files. Finally, repeat
this process at every level of your state’s grievance system.
For example: In Illinois there is a three-step grievance system. I have
personally used this method in the past (successfully). First, I filed
my grievance with my counselor; next I filed it with my institution’s
grievance office; then I filed it with the Administrative Review Board.
Each time I filed my grievance I also filed a Proof of Service form. By
doing so I was able to show the Court that I had attempted to resolve my
claims through the grievance process. This resulted in the court siding
with me and denying the State’s Motion for Summary Judgement. I am
enclosing proof of this method’s success for MIM(Prisons) to verify.
Although this is not the ideal solution it is one that will allow
prisoners to pursue their legal matters without being obstructed by the
Capitalist swine.
Example Proof Of Service
Hereby comes [your name] to swear under penalty of perjury that on the
date signed below I sent the [prison name] Grievance Officer a grievance
dated [date] concerning the misplacement of my TV and Norelco Razor by
prison authorities through the institutional level mail service.
Executed this ___ day of _____ [month] ________ [year]
_________________________________ [signature]
[get this stamped and signed by a notary public.]
MIM(Prisons) adds: This is a helpful update to the country-wide
grievance campaign and likely is a tactic that can be used in states
other than Illinois. How “easily” this tactic can be employed depends on
the conditions of one’s confinement. As some prisoners are held in
24-hour lockdown, with no access to a law library, and the only receipt
offered for filing a grievance is another beating from prison guards,
they might not be able to easily employ this tactic. But for many
prisoners, this might be a stepping stone from having one’s grievances
altogether ignored, to getting one’s foot in the door in the courts.
Many people have requested copies of our state-specific petitions to
demand grievances be addressed after running into problems with the
grievance system. From all the petitions we have sent out, we’ve heard
few updates about the progress on this campaign. It’s important that we
sum up our political practice and learn from it. And through this
summing up we can determine how to best modify our practice to improve
it. We call this ongoing summing up and improving of our practice
“dialectical materialism.” This is a scientific approach to our
political work that enables us to learn from doing, and when we do this
summing up publicly, through a newspaper like Under Lock &
Key, we can apply these lessons across a broad base of organizers
and be far more effective in the work that we are all doing.
So if you use, or have used, the above tactic, be sure to tell
ULK if it helped you, or what you did to improve it. That way we
can all learn from each others’ practice to improve our own.