The Trays Had Rotten Food. That Grievance Never Got a Number.

I filed a grievance because the food on the trays was rotten.

The eggs were spoiled.

That grievance never got a number.

It never got an answer.

Not a denial. Not a "non-grievable." Not a "we looked into it." Nothing.

Four years later it is still sitting in my log with three words in the response column.

NO RESPONSE.

Here is the form

Not my description of it. The form.

DC DOC Inmate Informal Resolution Complaint Form, filed January 22, 2022, Unit C2B. Complaint type: food service. Subject: rotten eggs on the dinner trays. Document j6s17-003 in the case archive.

It is a Step 1 Inmate Informal Resolution Complaint Form. It is dated January 22, 2022. It says the dinner trays contained rotten eggs as the main source of food. And it records that a sergeant came to inspect and left with a sample tray.

Open the full document in the archive

The plain English version

In January 2022 I was in federal pretrial custody. I filed a Step 1 grievance on January 22 about spoiled food on the meal trays. The jail's own grievance system is supposed to assign every complaint an IGP number. That is the tracking number. It is the thing that proves a complaint entered the system at all.

Mine never got one.

And a complaint with no number is a complaint that, on paper, never happened.

Somebody did come

I need to be precise here, because the form says something I have glossed over before.

Somebody came.

A sergeant walked up to inspect the trays and left carrying a sample tray out of the unit. That is written on the form, in my hand, the day it happened.

So this is not a story about a complaint nobody looked at.

It is worse than that.

A staff member came, looked at the food, decided it was real enough to physically carry a tray out of the pod as a sample, and after all of that the complaint still never got a tracking number and never got a written answer.

Somebody thought it was serious enough to take evidence.

The paperwork still went to zero.

Why this one matters more than it looks

A rotten egg sounds small next to the rest of what is in my record. I know that. I am publishing it anyway, and here is why.

You cannot fix what was never logged.

Every other fight I have had about that place runs into the same wall. Where is the paperwork. Where is the number. Where is the response. And when the answer is that no number was ever assigned, the institution gets to say the complaint does not exist, while I am the one holding the copy that says it does.

Rotten food is the cleanest possible test of that. There is no legal complexity in it. There is no constitutional argument to dodge. A man says the food on his tray is spoiled and asks somebody to look at it.

That is the easiest grievance in the building to answer.

They did not answer it.

What my log says

From my own grievance log, row 9, reproduced exactly as it is recorded:

Field	Entry
Date filed	January 22, 2022
IGP grievance number	NO IGP# ASSIGNED
Complaint type	ROTTEN FOOD
Concern	HEALTH
Step	STEP 1
Response?	N
Resolved?	N
Date of response	NO RESPONSE
Signed by	(blank)
DOC response	(blank)
My note at the time	TRAYS HAD ROTTEN FOOD / EGGS SPOILED

Two blanks and three noes. That is the entire institutional footprint of a health complaint that a sergeant physically responded to.

Twenty days earlier, the same category, a different outcome

Row 5 of the same log:

Field	Entry
Date filed	January 2, 2022
IGP grievance number	20220126-549
Complaint type	DENIED RESTROOM ACCESS
Concern	PERSONAL HYGIENE HEALTHCARE
Step	STEP 1
Response?	Y
Resolved?	N
Date of response	February 3, 2022
My note at the time	DENIED ACCESS TO RESTROOM & SHOWER

Read those two tables next to each other.

Same building. Same month. Same category of complaint. Same me.

One got a number and a response.

One got neither.

And notice what the one that worked actually produced. It got a number. It got an answer thirty two days later. And the resolved column still says N.

So the best case outcome in that system was a complaint that was tracked, answered, and never fixed.

The worst case was a complaint that was never tracked at all.

What the whole log shows

These numbers were re-counted against the source file today, not carried forward from an earlier article:

• 29 grievances in the log.
• 2 of 29 are marked resolved.
• 12 of 29 got no response at all.
• 8 of 29 carry NO IGP# ASSIGNED, and all 8 of those also got no response.

Read that last line again.

Every single grievance that failed to get a tracking number also failed to get an answer. Zero exceptions in eight tries.

That is not a coincidence and it is not a filing error on my end. A number is assigned by the institution, not by the inmate. I do not write the number. I hand in the form.

When the tracking number is the gate, and the gate is controlled entirely by the people being complained about, the absence of a number is not an administrative hiccup. It is the outcome.

I am not saying a court has found that. I am saying the pattern in my own log is eight for eight, and somebody with subpoena power should go find out whether those eight forms exist anywhere in that facility's records.

What I am asking for

I filed it. I remember the trays. I remember what the eggs smelled like. I remember thinking this one is so obvious that somebody will have to do something about it.

Somebody came and took a tray. Then the record stopped.

I am not asking anybody to take my word for the smell. The form is above. I am asking one question that a record can answer.

Where did the January 22, 2022 grievance go after the sample tray left the pod?

Produce the intake log it was entered into, or produce the log that shows it was never entered. Produce whatever happened to the sample tray. Produce the kitchen inspection records for January 2022. Produce the food service temperature logs. Produce the other inmate complaints from that pod that month.

The paper either exists or it does not, and either answer tells you something.

What this does not prove

It does not prove anybody was criminally charged, disciplined, or found liable for anything.

It does not prove the food made anyone sick. I did not claim that then and I am not claiming it now.

It does not prove the form was destroyed. Lost, ignored, never processed, and destroyed are four different things and I cannot tell you from my side which one happened.

It does not establish a court finding. Nothing here is a ruling.

What it does prove

It proves that on January 22, 2022, a man in custody filed a health complaint about spoiled food, and the form is public and you can read it.

It proves a staff member came and left with a sample tray.

It proves that complaint was never assigned a tracking number.

It proves it was never answered.

It proves that eight separate complaints in the same log share that exact fate, and that every one of the eight is a complaint the system has no record of needing to answer.

And it proves the thing I keep saying, in the smallest and least arguable case I have.

The record does not lie. But it can be kept from ever being written.

That is the part people miss. You do not have to beat a man's complaint. You just have to never number it.

What I need

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

Read it. Share it. Send it to a reporter who covers jails. Send it to an attorney who does conditions of confinement work. Send it to anybody who has ever been told their complaint was never received.

If you were in that facility in 2022 and you filed something that never came back, I want to hear from you. If you filed something that never got a number, I especially want to hear from you. One man with a missing form is a story. Ten men with missing forms is a system.

The full case archive is at /case. This document lives at j6s17-003.

If you have a record of your own that nobody will look at, I build those into public, organized, searchable files. That is the work. /services.

Release the records. Number the complaint. Answer the man.