Boston Globe: ‘Rubber stamp’ justice? In Mass., prison officials almost always deny prisoners’ claims of abuse behind bars
Originally published December 29, 2021 | Boston Globe
To produce this story, the Globe partnered with Boston University’s Justice Media Computational Journalism co-Lab, a collaboration between the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences’ BU Spark! program, the College of Communication, and the BU Hub Cross-College Challenge. Contributing students were Jay Font, Della Lin, Melissa Lin, and Namu Sampath, with assistance from professors Osama Alshaykh and Brooke Williams.
Every year, Massachusetts prisoners file hundreds of grievances alleging all manner of mistreatment behind bars, from excessive force to racism to harassment — all at the hands of prison employees.
And year after year, state records show, prison officials reject almost all of them.
A Globe review of more than 1,500 prisoner grievances filed from 2018 to 2021 at six of the largest state prisons found that investigators fully corroborated the prisoners’ claims only nine times.
Some of the complaints may very well be groundless. But the Correction Department itself has an internal benchmark where it expects to at least partially approve about 20 percent of overall prisoner grievances. During the three years reviewed by the Globe, prisoners’ claims of staff abuse were fully or partially supported no more than 7 percent of the time.
“Whoa,” said Kathleen Dennehy, a former correction commissioner, after hearing of the prisoners’ low success rate for grievances. “That’s a dismal number.”
The Massachusetts Department of Correction declined multiple requests for comment, but provided background material suggesting the department takes care in reviewing grievances. Claims are investigated by trained grievance coordinators and prisoners can appeal their decisions to the prison superintendent or even the Correction Department’s central office.
But that’s a far cry from assigning an outside agency to investigate grievances, something a blue ribbon panel on prison reform recommended 17 years ago. The Governor’s Commission on Correction Reform said it was unfair to prisoners that department personnel decided whether their allegations of abuse were valid.
Elizabeth Matos, a staff attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, called the state’s grievance system a “rubber stamp process” offering little chance of justice for the incarcerated men.
Filing a written grievance is one of the few ways prisoners can raise concerns about their treatment behind bars — where there is virtually no outside oversight. If their allegations are almost reflexively dismissed, serious issues such as sexual abuse, racial discrimination, and excessive use of force by correctional officers may go unacknowledged and unaddressed.
Through a public records request, the Globe in partnership with the Justice Media Computational Journalism co-Lab at Boston University obtained 1,540 grievances filed between January 2018 and February 2021 at state prisons in Concord, Norfolk, Gardner, Bridgewater, and two in Shirley.
In addition to the nine complaints where prison officials fully corroborated prisoners’ complaints, they partially approved 69 others, meaning investigators found part of the prisoners’ claims to be true.
Prison superintendents referred another 190 grievances to Internal Affairs for further review because they involved more serious allegations. But Internal Affairs keeps records differently, opening separate cases for each officer named in a single grievance. As a result, it is unclear how many prisoners prevailed. Over the three-year period, the office sided with prisoners 32 times out of 206 allegations investigated by Internal Affairs.
At most, prison officials approved or partially approved just 110 grievances against prison staff at the six prisons during the three years, representing 7 percent of the complaints. That’s well short of the 20 percent benchmark state prison officials use as a target for complaint approvals, though that target applies to the overall number it receives, which also includes complaints about food, facilities, and other issues aside from staff misconduct.
The prisoners’ low success rate suggests that the problems uncovered by the Spotlight team at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley could be systemwide. There, a prison-wide lockdown in early 2020 in response to a prisoner riot generated a record number of grievances, almost all of which were rejected. Of the 638 complaints filed at Souza-Baranowski from January to March of that year, just five were decided in favor of the incarcerated men.