Twenty-One Days Apart. One Got a Number. The One About My Lawyer Did Not.

On January 8, 2022 I filed a grievance because I could not get my mail.

It got a number. It got an answer. It got marked resolved.

Twenty-one days later I filed a grievance because I could not reach my attorney.

It never got a number. It never got an answer. It is still sitting in my log with three words in the response column.

NO RESPONSE.

Read that again. Same jail. Same inmate. Same grievance box. Same month.

One was about letters. One was about my lawyer.

Guess which one they processed.

The plain English version

I kept a log of every grievance I filed while I was in custody. Twenty-nine of them. Dates, numbers, complaint types, whether anybody answered, whether anybody signed it.

Two of those twenty-nine are marked resolved. Two.

One of the two is the mail grievance from January 8, 2022.

The other one is water, and I already wrote about that one.

That is the whole list. Two out of twenty-nine.

And the very first time I put on paper that I could not reach the man defending me in a federal case, the form did not even get a number.

The receipt

FACT. Grievance filed January 8, 2022. IGP number 20220126-550. Complaint type: COMMUNICATIONS. Concern: MAIL. Step 1. Response: Y. Resolved: Y. Date of response: February 3, 2022.

FACT. Grievance filed January 29, 2022. IGP number: NO IGP# ASSIGNED. Complaint type: DENIED ACCESS TO ATTORNEY. Concern: LEGAL COMMUNICATION. Step 1. Response: N. Resolved: N. Date of response: NO RESPONSE. DOC response: NO RESPONSE.

My own note in the argument column on that second one, written at the time:

6TH AMENDMENT VIOLATION / COMMUNICATION / UNABLE TO PROPERLY PREPARE FOR DEFENSE.

RYAN STATEMENT. I was not being dramatic when I wrote that. I was facing federal charges. I could not reach my attorney. I filed the form the way the rules told me to file it. Then nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.

The timeline

Date	What I filed	Number	Answered
Jan 2, 2022	Denied restroom and shower access	20220126-549	Yes, Feb 3
Jan 7, 2022	Conditions affecting mental health	20220126-551	Yes, Feb 8
Jan 8, 2022	Denied access to mail	20220126-550	Yes, Feb 3. Resolved.
Jan 22, 2022	Rotten food on the trays	NO IGP# ASSIGNED	No
Jan 29, 2022	Denied access to attorney	NO IGP# ASSIGNED	No
Mar 9, 2022	Denied access to discovery	NO IGP# ASSIGNED	No

DOCUMENTED INFERENCE. Look at the three numbers at the top. 20220126-549. 20220126-550. 20220126-551. Three grievances filed on three different days in early January, and all three carry the same eight digits in front: 20220126. That is the date format this system uses. Those three were all assigned their numbers on January 26, 2022, in one batch.

So on January 26 somebody sat down and assigned numbers.

Three days later I filed the one about my lawyer.

It never got one.

I am not telling you that proves intent. I am telling you the machine was demonstrably working that month, because I have three numbers stamped with the date it was working.

What the record shows

FACT. Of the twenty-nine grievances in my log, eight carry NO IGP# ASSIGNED, and all eight of those got no response at all.

FACT. Twelve of the twenty-nine got no response of any kind.

FACT. Two of the twenty-nine are marked resolved.

FACT. January 29, 2022 is the first grievance in the entire log filed under the concern LEGAL COMMUNICATION. The next one is March 9, 2022, thirty-nine days later. That one also got no number and no response.

DOCUMENTED INFERENCE. The pattern in this log is not random. Grievances about hygiene, food, mail and conditions moved through the system at least some of the time. Grievances about my ability to defend myself did not.

What I say

RYAN STATEMENT. A grievance about mail is a grievance about comfort. A grievance about your attorney is a grievance about your freedom.

The system in that building answered the first one in twenty-six days and marked it resolved.

It never answered the second one at all.

You do not have to believe me about what that felt like. You can just read the two rows.

What this does not prove

I want to be straight about the limits, because that is how you build a record that holds.

This does not prove anybody made a decision to bury that specific form. Nobody has admitted that. No court has found it.

This does not prove a pattern that a judge has ruled on.

This does not tell you what the officers involved would say, because nobody has asked them on the record where I can see it.

NEEDS AUTHENTICATION. The grievance log is my own contemporaneous record. The underlying forms, the intake logs, the IGP assignment records and the internal correspondence are held by the facility, not by me. Those documents would settle every question in this article in an afternoon.

What it does prove

Two grievances. Twenty-one days apart. Same building, same process, same inmate.

One got a number, an answer, and a resolution.

One about my lawyer got nothing.

And eight forms in my log never got a number, and every single one of those eight went unanswered.

That is not a rumor. That is not gossip. That is a row in a log with a date on it.

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

What I need

Release the intake logs. Release the IGP assignment records for January 2022. Release the internal correspondence on the forms that never got numbers.

If the process worked the way it was supposed to, that paperwork will say so and I will publish it myself.

If it did not, that paperwork will say that too.

Either way, release it.

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 in that building in 2022 and you filed something that never came back, I want to hear from you. If you are an attorney or a journalist who works on jail grievance records, I want to hear from you too.

The full case file is at the case archive.

And if you need somebody to take a mess of documents and turn it into something the public can actually read, that is the work I do. It is at /services.