This story is part of Locked Out, a special series from PJP about voting, politics and democracy behind bars. Click here to read more.

In 2005, when I first entered the Washington Corrections Center, guards explained the formal rules and expectations of prison life. The thrust was this: Prison is not a democracy. You cannot protest and you cannot vote, they said. 

But should concerns arise, we could advocate for our interests through the internal grievance system or the courts, they said.

In other words, these tools were the only voices we now had.

People who had long been in the system rolled their eyes at this. If you file grievances or lawsuits, “they will fuck with you,” they warned.

In my over 20 years inside, I have filed 300 grievances and 10 lawsuits in an attempt to speak out against mistreatment, unfairness and injustice that I and others have experienced behind bars. I have relied on the official means promised to me, only to discover that the prison veterans were right. 

At nearly every turn, vindictive guards and onerous bureaucratic rules have frustrated my efforts to pursue grievances and file lawsuits. Again and again, my speaking out has been met with prison transfers, unsafe cell assignments and solitary confinement — much of which I consider to be retaliation. 

No one expects an American prison to be a full-blown democracy. But we do not give up all of our rights when we are incarcerated. We are still entitled to many hallmarks of a democratic society, including safety, dignity and access to recourse in the face of injury. When these are violated, and the tools available to address these violations are inadequate, what then? 

This is one of the questions fueling efforts to restore voting rights to people behind bars here in Washington state and elsewhere. Proponents believe that incarcerated people deserve a meaningful voice in the systems that control their lives. A vote is a voice. A vote turns you into a constituent, and that means someone other than you is looking out for you. 

300 grievances and 10 lawsuits

From the moment I entered prison, I learned that speaking out had consequences even for serious allegations.  

I filed one of my first grievances not long after I arrived.

I had sought medical attention for a severe migraine at a private prison in Arizona, where Washington state had sent around 500 prisoners, including me, to reduce overcrowding. In a room connected to the medical exam room, a doctor ordered me to drop my pants. Then he proceeded to perform what he called a “hernia exam.” This consisted of him stroking my penis with an ungloved hand. People said this provider molested others too. 

I was sure I would get a response given the serious nature of what was occurring, but I never received one. 

Over the next 15 years, I experienced, witnessed and heard about countless indignities, big and small. There was the time the prison staff refused to make me court-required copies of legal pleadings. The time a group of prisoners beat another man with a padlock in a sock. The multiple times prison staff refused cell transfers to me and others after being notified of threats of violence against us. 

In many of these cases, I used the two tools the prison administration said I had available to me. By 2019, I had filed over 300 grievances, in part because to exercise my right to sue, a federal law requires prisoners to “exhaust” all internal grievance channels first. 

I can say definitively that they did little to bring about positive systemic change, though I twice won settlements that paid me a total of $100,000. Throughout this intensely lonely journey, I have found myself wishing for someone to whom I could turn for help. Someone with power. Someone besides me who had my and fellow prisoners’ best interests in mind. I wished I could vote for a candidate, whether it was in local, state or national elections, who might care about prisoner rights. 

A pattern of retaliation

Early in my sentence, seasoned prisoners warned me that I would be put on “diesel therapy” if I continued to voice my concerns. This is what they call the act of transferring troublemakers to new facilities. Diesel refers to the fuel used in the transport buses.

A transfer is among the worst ways to be retaliated against because it removes you from what passes as a community in prison. It disrupts routines. It leaves friends and allies behind and you have to contend with new hostile situations. Property can be lost or delayed in transit, or even destroyed if you fail to pay the shipping fee (a challenge when you lose your prison job). More than once, I missed court deadlines because prisons withheld my legal files after a transfer.

Since landing in prison, I have been transferred many times to various prisons. I have also been sent to the hole over a dozen times for trumped-up rule violations or shortly after filing a lawsuit. 

“Retaliation is deeply engrained in the correctional office subculture,” writes James E. Robertson, a professor emeritus at Minnesota State University who specializes in prisoner rights and correctional law, in the University of Michigan Journal of Reform in 2009. 

I know this to be true. The entire system is designed to discourage prisoners from filing any complaint — and to extinguish hope. 

After more than a decade in prison, I was burned out. I finally got too tired to resist any longer. In late 2018, prison staff wrongly charged me with improperly possessing “legal property of other inmates” and sent me to the hole. 

After that, I succumbed. I quit using the grievance system and courts, which had failed me time and time again. In the five years since, I have not received a single major rule violation or transfer. (I received one minor infraction for being in the shower too long.)

I traded my voice for my sanity. 

Could the vote offer relief?

To someone outside, the connection between voting and prison grievances might be difficult to understand. The two are fundamentally unrelated systems. 

But the point I’m making is that prisoners like me have so little voice and so little control over our environment and rehabilitation that we cling to the most tenuous possibilities of relief. In this case, we fantasize that voting for a candidate who cares about us might protect us from some of the most egregious abuses and forms of retaliation. 

For example, Washington state Rep. Tarra D. Simmons, a formerly incarcerated woman, has sponsored a bill that would allow most people in prisons the right to vote and sit on juries.

“If you’re learning about candidates and learning about issues that are bigger than yourself,” Simmons said in a committee meeting earlier this year, “then you are on a path to rehabilitation.”

I’d like to vote for her. That may not solve all of our problems, but it would be a start.

The right to vote would allow me to have a say in laws that could turn a system of punishment into a system of rehabilitation and reintegration. I could support representatives from my district who would be able to speak on my behalf. I could be a constituent to political leaders who believe that people behind bars have a right to be heard and deserve, like all human beings, an audience who listens.