The Grievance Log Starts in November. The Complaints Started in September.

I kept a log of every grievance I filed inside that jail.

Twenty nine entries. November 7, 2021 through July 16, 2022. Date filed, grievance number, complaint type, which step it reached, whether anybody answered, whether anything got fixed.

I have published out of that log for two weeks now. The rotten trays. The pod they sprayed. The water. The grievances that never got a number.

This week I went back to the original file instead of my own notes about it, and I found something I had walked past every single time.

The grievance log starts in November. My complaints started in September.

The plain English version

The workbook has two things in it, not one.

The first is the formal log. Twenty nine rows. Those are the grievances that entered the system, most of them with a tracking number on them.

The second is a tally I kept on the side. Twenty seven complaint categories, each one with a count and a date range. It is a running count of what I was actually complaining about in there.

Those two lists do not agree, and they are not close.

The receipt

FACT. The formal log's first entry is dated November 7, 2021.

FACT. The tally's earliest dated categories are September 13, 2021 and September 18, 2021.

September 13 to November 7 is fifty five days. Almost eight weeks of complaints sitting in front of the first grievance the system ever numbered.

FACT. Set aside every medical and mental health category, because those stay out of everything I publish, and the remaining categories in that tally still add up to more than seventy separate complaints.

FACT. The non medical rows in the formal log number nineteen.

Seventy eight complaints on one side. Nineteen grievances on the other.

What the tally actually lists

These are complaint types I logged for myself, with the counts I wrote down at the time. Every one of them is my own contemporaneous record, not a court finding.

Complaint type	Count I logged	Earliest date
Grievance process broken	17	2022-03-19
Hygiene, haircut, nails, shave	8	2021-10-17
Denied access to discovery	7	2022-01-15
Lack of food	6	2021-09-13
Racial remarks	5	2021-09-18
Constitutional right violations	4	2022-02-10
Video visit request	4	2021-10-11
Water turned off	4	not dated in the file
Denied religious services	2	2021-10-15
Officer violence, threats, assaults	2	2022-01-24
CS gas and mace	2	2021-11-11
Confiscation of mail and legal documents	2	not dated in the file
No air conditioning in the pod	2	not dated in the file
Denied attorney access	1	2022-01-29
Request for attorney	1	2022-03-09
Rec time cut	1	2022-02-26
Stolen commissary	1	not dated in the file

That table is seventeen of the twenty two non medical categories in the tally, and those seventeen alone total sixty nine complaints. The five I left out add the other nine. I left them out because one of them names a staff member by rank and name and I am not putting a name in a headline table off a tally line, and because the rest are already covered in articles I have published.

Not one line in that table is a diagnosis. Not one is private. Every one of them is a condition of confinement or a denial of access.

Why it matters

A grievance number is the handle. It is how a complaint gets routed, appealed, counted, and found again later when a lawyer or a judge asks what happened.

A complaint that never becomes a numbered grievance leaves no handle at all. It is not denied. There is nothing to deny. It simply is not in anybody's file.

So the fifty five day gap at the front of this log is not a filing habit. It is a question.

Where does a complaint go in the first fifty five days, before the paperwork starts?

What the record shows

FACT. Twenty nine formal entries. FACT. Two of the twenty nine say resolved. FACT. Twelve of the twenty nine got no response at all. FACT. Eight of the twenty nine carry NO IGP# ASSIGNED where a number should be, and all eight of those also got no response. FACT. The first entry in the log is November 7, 2021. The earliest complaint in my own tally is September 13, 2021.

What I say

RYAN STATEMENT. I was not quiet for fifty five days and then suddenly started filing paperwork. I was complaining the entire time. The paperwork is where the record picks me up, not where I started.

RYAN STATEMENT. I wrote that tally for myself, in there, because I already did not trust that the formal channel was keeping an honest count. That instinct is the only reason either of these lists exists.

What needs authentication

NEEDS AUTHENTICATION. The tally does not say what a single count represents. Whether each one is a separate written filing, a kiosk request, a sick call slip, or a verbal complaint to an officer is not written in the file. I know what I meant when I wrote it. The file does not say it, so I will not publish it as if it does.

NEEDS AUTHENTICATION. Three categories in the tally carry counts with no date range attached. They are in the table above marked as not dated, and they stay marked that way until the underlying paper says otherwise.

NEEDS AUTHENTICATION. The jail's own grievance database is the only thing that settles whether these complaints exist on their side of the wall. I do not have it. They do.

What this does not prove

It does not prove the jail destroyed anything. It does not prove any specific officer did anything. It does not prove the fifty five day gap is misconduct rather than a change in how I was keeping records.

I am not going to make it bigger than it is.

What it does prove

It proves the formal log is the floor, not the ceiling.

Every article I have written off this log, every number I have cited, every count of eight and twelve and twenty nine, has been drawn from the smaller of two lists. The larger list has been sitting in the same workbook the whole time.

And it proves the point I keep coming back to. The record does not lie, but it can be incomplete, and the only fix for an incomplete record is to ask for the other half.

I am asking for the other half.

Produce the grievance database for my booking number. Produce the kiosk request history. Produce the sick call log. Produce the logbook entries from September and October of 2021. Not a summary. The native records.

If their system shows nothing before November 7, that is an answer and I will publish it.

If it shows fifty five days of complaints that never became grievances, that is a different answer, and I will publish that too.

The bottom line

Twenty nine is the number the system kept.

Seventy eight is the number I kept.

The distance between those two numbers is the whole argument about whether a grievance process works.

What I need

Do not threaten anyone. Do not harass anyone. Do not contact anyone in my name.

Read it. Share it.

If you were held in that facility in 2021 or 2022 and you kept your own paperwork, your kiosk printouts, your grievance carbon copies, your commissary receipts with dates on them, I want to see them. Two logs that were kept independently and agree with each other are worth more than either one alone.

Send receipts. Send evidence. Send witnesses.

Tell your story here.

The full case file is here.

Put eyes on the record.