From Prison Policy Initiative:
When incarcerated people face abuse and mistreatment, they can typically file a formal complaint with jail or prison administrators. In federal prisons, the system for resolving these complaints is known as the “Administrative Remedy Program,” but it’s more commonly referred to as a “grievance system” in state prisons and local jails. Grievance systems are supposed to provide incarcerated people with a way to challenge issues they face behind bars — such as inadequate medical care, harassment by corrections officers, or unsanitary living conditions — and (hopefully) receive some kind of relief. In practice, however, incarcerated people who turn to grievance systems are forced to run a gauntlet of rules and regulations just to be heard, and very rarely succeed. This is especially true when it comes to medical complaints: our analysis of a decade of data from the Data Liberation Project finds that, between 2014 and 2024, a startling 98% of medical grievances were rejected for reasons ranging from the bureaucratic (such as using the wrong size sheet of paper) to the substantive (actually being denied on the merits of the complaint). Less than 1% of medical cases ended in a grant of relief.
A functioning grievance system is an important lifeline for incarcerated people, who have very little leverage to affect their circumstances. It’s especially important for health-related matters, given that incarcerated people suffer from illness and disease at rates far exceeding that of the general public, and their access to medical care is highly constrained and notoriously awful. But in the end, a system does what it is designed to do, not what it is intended to do, and the federal grievance system rejects nearly every medical complaint filed by incarcerated people, often for vague or trivial reasons.
In this briefing, we examine the statuses of nearly 66,000 medical grievances from across the Bureau of Prisons to determine what kinds of medical complaints are most common in the federal system and how incarcerated people fare in their pursuit of relief. Continue reading >>>
|
|
|
|
