Prison Legal News
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Prison Legal News is a magazine co-created by Paul Wright, a former prisoner, and is according to Kiriakou the longest-running newspaper or magazine produced by and for current and former prisoners in American history.

The grievance study

Kiriakou cites a July 2014 article in the magazine, titled "BOP Grievance System Contributes to Defiance of Compliance by Prisoners," reporting a study by the U.S. Marshals Service and the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. The study found that the failure of Bureau of Prisons officials to respond adequately to grievances contributes to higher levels of violence in federal prisons, and that one benefit of the grievance system to the Bureau is deflecting or reducing potential litigation, many federal court decisions having been decided in the Bureau's favour on the basis that prisoners failed to exhaust administrative remedies.

The article further reported that the system is perceived by prisoners as overly formal and more concerned with procedural deadlines than the substance of a complaint, and that a higher volume of late or rejected grievance responses is associated with increased violence. Two features of the process consistently predicted violence: the proportion of responses that were late and the proportion that were substantively rejected.

Kiriakou's conclusion from the data is to ask whether the Bureau is genuinely worried about violence or about maintaining what he calls a regimen of corruption, and to characterise the pattern, claiming to act to reduce violence while acting in ways that increase it, as pervasive, systemic and far-reaching.

Other citations

Kiriakou also draws on the magazine for its reporting that the European Court of Human Rights refused to extradite a terrorism suspect from the United Kingdom to the United States, on the grounds that his mental and physical health would face significant deterioration in the more hostile American prison system.

See also

- Bureau of Prisons
- FCI Loretto
- Medical care in federal prison
- Administrative remedy process
