They Marked It Resolved. Their Own Answer Said It Was Still Being Investigated.

By Ryan Nichols

I kept a log while I was inside.

Twenty nine grievances. November 7, 2021 through July 16, 2022. Date filed, grievance number, what I complained about, what step it reached, whether anyone answered, whether it was ever resolved.

Two of the twenty nine are marked RESOLVED.

One of those two is the water.

And the official answer on that one, written on the form, says the allegations are still being investigated.

Read that again.

The same row says resolved and still being investigated.

The plain English version

I filed twenty nine grievances in the jail system over about nine months.

Twelve of them were never answered at all. Not late. Not denied. No response.

Eight of them were never even assigned a grievance number, and every single one of those eight also got no response. A complaint with no number is a complaint that cannot be tracked, cannot be appealed, and cannot be proven to have existed.

Two of the twenty nine ended up marked resolved.

The second of those two is the reason I am writing this.

The receipt

FACT. This is what my own log records for that grievance, exactly as it is written:

• Date filed: 2022-05-02
• Grievance number: 2022050-120
• Complaint type: DENIED ACCESS TO WATER
• Concern: PUNITIVE TREATMENT
• Steps reached: STEP 1 and 2 and 4
• Response received: Y
• Resolved: Y
• Date of response: 2022-05-17
• Signed by, manager name: LANCASTER
• The response, word for word: "THE ALLEGATIONS ON THIS IGP IS CURRENTLY BEING INVESTIGATED"

RYAN STATEMENT. My own note in the argument column on that row reads: water being shut off in the hole for punitive reasons is torture, escalated to Step 4, no response.

NEEDS AUTHENTICATION. The paper the response was written on. I have the log. The signed original and the facility copy of grievance 2022050-120 are records that exist on their side, and they should be produced. My log is my contemporaneous record, not their file.

What that row actually says

An answer that says an allegation is currently being investigated is not a finding.

It is not a denial.

It is not a resolution.

It is a receipt that says we have started.

Fifteen days after I filed it, somebody wrote that the investigation was underway, and then the line marked resolved got a Y next to it.

I escalated it to Step 4.

Nobody wrote the ending.

DOCUMENTED INFERENCE. A grievance system that closes a file as resolved while its own written response says the matter is still open is not resolving complaints. It is clearing a queue.

Those are two different jobs and only one of them helps a person.

The line that tells you the whole story

There is one more row in that log I want you to see.

FACT. January 15, 2022. Grievance number 22092746-049. Complaint type, as I wrote it at the time: GRIEVANCES UNANSWERED. Filed at Step 4. Response: N. Resolved: N.

I filed a grievance because my grievances were not being answered.

That grievance was not answered.

You do not have to take a position on me, on January 6, on any of it, to understand what that means. A complaint process that will not answer a complaint about itself has stopped being a process.

The shape of the whole log

FACT. Out of twenty nine grievances:

• 12 received no response at all
• 8 carry no grievance number assigned, and all 8 of those also received no response
• 2 are marked resolved
• The last four entries in the log, filed June and July 2022, all have no grievance number and no response. The log does not end with an answer. It ends with silence.

FACT. My own tally column in that same file counts the categories I filed on most. The three I am publishing here are GRIEVANCE PROCESS BROKEN, 17, DENIED ACCESS TO DISCOVERY, 7, and WATER TURNED OFF, 4.

PRIVATE / NOT PUBLIC. There are rows in that log I am not publishing and will not publish. Medical is mine. Some of what is in that file is not going on a website, not now and not later. That is not me softening the record. That is me keeping a line I set for myself a long time ago.

What this does not prove

It does not prove what any individual officer did on any individual day. This is a grievance log, not bodycam and not a court finding.

It does not prove the facility file matches my file. Their copy is theirs to produce.

It does not prove anybody broke a law. I am not a lawyer and this is not a legal conclusion.

Nobody in this piece has been found to have done anything by any court, and I am not saying otherwise.

What it does prove

It proves I asked. In writing. Twenty nine times. With dates.

It proves twelve of those asks came back with nothing.

It proves eight of them never got a number, which is the cleanest way there is to make a complaint disappear without ever denying it.

And it proves that on the one about water, the word resolved was written next to an answer that said the matter was still being looked into.

The record does not lie. It just sits there until somebody reads it.

What I need

I am not asking you to take my word for any of this.

I am asking for the paper.

Produce grievance 2022050-120 and its Step 2 and Step 4 file. Produce grievance 22092746-049. Produce the log of every grievance I filed between November 2021 and July 2022, with the numbers assigned and the disposition of each one. Produce the eight that never got a number, or state plainly on the record that they were never entered.

If their file says something different from mine, show me. I will publish that too.

That is the whole ask.

Do not do the wrong thing with this

Do not threaten anyone.

Do not harass anyone.

Do not contact anyone in my name.

Read it. Share it. Send receipts, evidence, witnesses. Put eyes on the record.

If you were inside during that window and you filed grievances too, tell your story. If yours also came back with no number, I want to know, because one man with a log is an anecdote and forty men with logs is a pattern.

The rest of the archive, the documents, the timeline and the grievance record, lives at the case file. The next filing goes out by email and text from that page. No algorithm decides whether you see it.

If you build things for a living and you need somebody who can turn a shoebox of paper into a record that holds up, that is what I do now. I learned it the expensive way.

And the book is here.