Roadmap to Redress

Ethan Cheers, JD Anticipated May 2027, Law & Public Policy Scholar and Knauer Fellow*

Much of my professional experience has revolved around institutional grievance processes. Grievances are formal complaints through which individuals seek review, remedy, or accountability for perceived violations of policy, rights, or institutional obligations. Before law school, I helped countless students submit formal grievances against fellow students, faculty, and institutional policy. As the Director of the Michigan State University student government’s Student Rights Advocates service, I saw the palpable institutional power that is wielded in determining the how, when, where, why in which complaints are processed and adjudicated. There is an inherent tension in institutional grievance processes: the institution responsible for administering the system is often also the subject of complaints brought within it, creating structural advantages that can shape outcomes.

For two years, I served as an Ombudsman Analyst at the Office of the Legislative Corrections Ombudsman (“LCO”), an oversight agency within the Michigan Legislature. As part of this role, I investigated complaints from incarcerated individuals across the twenty-six state prisons, their families, and legislators. Most of my investigations involved reviewing grievances and grievance procedures. In jails and prisons, grievances are the primary avenue for the incarcerated to seek redress for abuses, policy violations, etc. It was immediately apparent to me in these investigations that facility grievance procedures often served to insulate staff, officers, the facility, and the Department as a whole from accountability. Grievance policies were used to ward off many meritorious complaints on petty, technical grounds like untimeliness, listing multiple complaints on one form, not providing names, listing a ‘non-grievable’ issue, vagueness, unclear writing, and more. Nowhere was this more evident than at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility (“WHV”) in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which a colleague and I were assigned to monitor.

WHV houses the incarcerated women in the state—all 1,810 of them. The facility opened in 1977 and has consistently faced scrutiny due to overcrowding, abuses, and abhorrent conditions. One inmate we spoke to often, Krystal Clark, consistently brought forth complaints about mold at the facility and its effect on her health since 2016. Clark submitted grievances upon grievances, and no remedy came. In 2023, a doctor identified the presence of mold in her ears and lungs as well as a severe fungal infection brought on by mold exposure.

Despite a unique pressure campaign that has built up over the past year, the MDOC continues to do the same song and dance they did for my colleague and I years ago when we saw the mold ourselves. They deny any existence of toxic mold and point to contracted testing to support their claims. Due to statutory restrictions and weak oversight mechanisms, the institutional processes available to the incarcerated in Michigan have failed Clark and all the women at WHV.

When redress is foreclosed by the grievance process and (rarely present) oversight mechanisms, where do the incarcerated turn? The answer has almost always been the courts. “[L]itigation has probably been the single most important source of change in prisons and jails in the past forty years.” In 1996, Congress passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act and it was signed by then President Bill Clinton. The law enacted massive changes that greatly limited the ability of prisoners to bring suit in federal court. Among these changes were filing fee requirements, limits on injunctions, attorney fee caps, a physical injury requirement, and most significant, a mandatory exhaustion of administrative remedies.

A decade later the impact of the law was clear, as prisoner lawsuits filed in federal courts decreased 60 percent since 1995. This has led to less judicial oversight which is often the only method of corrections oversight available in the United States. The original thesis behind the law was that it would bar meritless lawsuits that were flooding the courts. A reasonable deduction would be that, after passage, the lawsuits that did survive the PLRA’s procedural barriers would be stronger. Yet, “the average likelihood of plaintiffs’ success is lower, not higher, on the post-PLRA docket.” While the PLRA applies solely to federal law and thus, federal civil rights claims, most states have passed their own versions of the law and limited access to their courts.

In 2019, Krystal Clark and numerous similarly situated incarcerated women brought a class action suit against the Michigan Department of Corrections seeking injunctive relief and damages for their exposure to mold. Some of the grievances were rejected on highly technical grounds. However, in 2025, Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Stafford found that the MDOC failed to demonstrate that the plaintiffs had not properly exhausted their administrative remedies, as they argued. In explaining how the grievance process operated in practice, she observed: “MDOC officials stymy the prisoners’ efforts to get relief either through the grievance system or in court… This court should not sanction MDOC’s machinations.” She was not the only one to come to this conclusion. Seven years before, another judge characterized the MDOC’s prison grievance system as a “classic case of Orwellian doublethink[.]” It was this reality that motivated my Knauer Fellowship project.

The PLRA should be repealed altogether. Yet, the present adverse effect of the law is too intimate to ignore. As a result, while repeal is the ultimate goal, we must walk and chew gum at the same time: helping individuals preserve their right to file by properly navigating labyrinthine state and federal grievance procedures while continuing to push for repeal. To that end, my goal from the outset was to make grievance systems easier to navigate, as much as that is possible. The idea was to provide as concise and accessible of a document that synthesized State grievance procedures: a Roadmap to Redress. I set out to create a document that would condense long policy documents into a one or two page ‘need-to-know’ document that operates like a checklist to ensure that proper exhaustion is reached.

The primary objective was to make the roadmap with the incarcerated in mind as the primary audience. In my experience, their access to grievance procedure materials can be limited and, when they are able to access those materials, they are often long and inaccessible. Some policies even restrict their ability to use assistance from peers or staff to file formal grievances. Another audience targeted by this resource are parents, relatives, and friends of the incarcerated. In addition, when armed with the significance of proper exhaustion, family and friends are more capable of convincing their loved ones to exhaust their administrative remedies despite the very real and legitimate fear of retaliation or a general cynicism towards a bureaucratic process that often feels like a dead end.

This resource also equips legislators with a clearer understanding of the grievance process, enabling them to quickly direct constituents to relevant information and support. Attorneys representing incarcerated individuals frequently encounter grievance and exhaustion issues, and this toolkit provides a centralized reference for navigating those requirements. Finally, this resource may help members of the public direct affected individuals to relevant information while also highlighting the need to mobilize for reform of grievance systems and repeal of the PLRA.

Roadmap to Redress is a resource I began to develop as a Knauer Fellow in Washington D.C. as part of Temple Law School’s Law & Public Policy Program. It begins by informing the reader on the Prison Litigation Reform Act, and in particular, the significance and effects of its exhaustion requirement. It continues with the origins of the project before including the ‘roadmaps’ for five states: New Jersey, Virginia, Michigan, Arizona, and Alabama. I then dive into an analysis of the grievance procedures in each of the five states. Thereafter, I attach a toolkit that seeks to identify ‘model grievance procedures’ that are as ideal as a process under this architecture can be and detail a methodology to recreate the roadmap cross different jurisdictions. Roadmap to Redress is not a silver bullet to addressing the ills of our criminal legal system. But it does fit the framework of non-reformist reform that can disrupt the prison system’s reliance on procedural attrition as a shield against accountability.

This project was developed under the guidance of my supervising professor, Noelia Rivera-Calderón, whose mentorship has been pivotal to my development as a student, advocate, and person. It was also shaped by conversations with Philadelphia-area attorneys who have litigated exhaustion issues, particularly Grace Harris, who introduced me to the concept of non-reformist reform and gave me a new framework for understanding the possibilities and limits of this work. Additionally, I drew inspiration from Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project’s two-page guide to filing grievances. Much of the research was informed by David Fathi’s report No Equal Justice and Michigan Law Prison Information Project’s Prison and Jail Grievance Policies: Lessons from a Fifty-State Survey.