Shocking News! BOP Grievance Procedure Doesn’t Work – Update for March 31, 2026

We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

DOG BITES MAN

In journalism, a “dog bites man” story is one about something that is so obvious as to not be newsworthy. Dogs bite people all the time. What would be newsworthy would be a story about a man biting a dog.

Last week, the Prison Policy Initiative published the classic canine-chomping-guy report, a revealing study that will shock no one familiar with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

PPI studied nearly 66,000 BOP inmate administrative remedy complaints (the so-called BP-9 and its appellate brothers, the BP-10 and BP-11) filed over a 10-year period ending in January 2024. The PPI limited its study to complaints addressing medical care. The results were as sobering as they were unsurprising.

Over the period, 32% of all medical complaints filed by inmates were rejected as “improperly filed” (not enough copies, filed late or raising two issues instead of one).  Another 51% of the complaints had been closed on appeal for similar “administrative reasons.” A scant 14% of all medical grievances made it past administrative procedural hurdles, only to be denied on the merits.

Only 940 cases of the 65,712 complaints PPI studied – 1.4% of the total – were granted relief.

Your odds of buying a winning “scratch-off” are ten times greater.

Complaints about mental health and dental care were the highest percentage of cases denied relief: 78% of dental and 83% of mental health grievances were tossed out for administrative reasons. Complaints about other forced medical treatment and forced psychotropic medication had zero cases that even cleared the procedural hurdles.

PPI said, “In theory, grievance procedures are an important tool for incarcerated people to pursue fair treatment and defend themselves in a system designed to disempower them. This power is particularly important in the context of medical care, where needs are widespread and urgent, and where failure to meet them can lead to injury, illness, and death. In practice, however, the grievance system is a black hole, a time-waster, and a deterrent to complaining at all. It’s a long and winding maze of rules and technicalities that must be cleared before an incarcerated person can get their complaint to a setting that might actually force a change: the courts.”

Prison Policy Initiative, In federal prisons, the grievance system is designed to reject nearly all complaints about medical care (March 24, 2026)

~ Thomas L. Root