by Brittney Melton

June 21, 2026

Good morning. This week, Haitian immigrants asked the Supreme Court to toss a case to remove thousands of Haitians from the U.S. in light of new evidence, former ICE leader Todd Lyons has been hired to help consult on national security and defense, and the Supreme Court ruled that the law used to prosecute a marijuana user violated his Second Amendment right to bear arms.

‘The failed grievance system’

by Joseph Shapiro, NPR News Investigations correspondent

The gruesome death of Matthew Phillips in prison haunted us. It was one reason we wanted to investigate why the prison grievance system fails.

For a decade, I’ve reported with Christie Thompson of The Marshall Project on abuse and deaths in American prisons. Over and over, prisoners told us of their frustration trying to correct a problem, that they tried to seek help or to give a warning by using the grievance process, formally the “Administrative Remedy Program” — but their complaints were ignored.

In 2022, Christie and I reported on a string of deaths in a disciplinary unit at the federal prison at Thomson, Illinois. Matthew’s mother, Sue Phillips, told us that her son filed multiple grievances about things like not getting fed or being served spoiled food. When he filed complaints, corrections officers, he told her, harassed him and retaliated.

An illustration with a pale yellow background shows, at the center, a woman in an orange prison uniform with her right hand on her stomach. She is writing a grievance on sheets of paper that are flying over her head. Over one of the pages is the word “Reject.” In the upper left corner, there is a drawing of FCI Aliceville, a prison. In the lower right corner, this is a view of two floors of prison cell doors, with a set of stairs leading up to the second floor. Scattered around the illustration are gray and orange blocks and shapes, and over the entire illustration, there is a grid made up of thin, light purple lines.

Michelle Mildenberg Lara for The Marshall Project

That’s why, she believes, guards at Thomson on March 2, 2020, left him in a recreation cage with two white supremacists.

They beat him brutally and Matthew died.

Matthew, who was Jewish, had a large Star of David tattooed on his chest. “It was just a large Star of David,” Sue told us. “You could not miss it.”

Last year, Brandon “Whitey” Simonson was convicted of murder and hate crimes in Matthew’s death. Kristopher “No Luck” Martin pleaded guilty.

In theory, a working grievance system helps prisoners and prison officials. One common reason for filing: Requests for urgent medical care. And the system is an early warning system — about problems from an abusive corrections officer to polluted water — that could help wardens run a safer prison.

We got an idea for how to quantify the effectiveness of the grievance system when Christie found data obtained by the Data Liberation Project, a nonprofit that collects large government databases. We analyzed a data set of nearly a million prison grievance cases filed between January 2000 and late May 2024.

Our analysis showed what men and women in prison had been telling us: The prison grievance system is broken and almost useless to prisoners with problems.

In 2023, the last full year of data, prisoners won grievances less than 2% of the time. And just 1% of pleas for medical care. In 2000, prisoners succeeded with almost 7% of their claims.

Our numbers don’t count the high number of cases where someone tries to file a grievance but they’re stopped.

“There are very, very large numbers of cases where people have filed grievances and they just never get a response of any sort,” said John Boston, a former New York Legal Aid Society attorney who wrote a manual that prisoners use to file grievances and lawsuits. “And if they make an inquiry about their grievance, they’ll say, we have no record of any grievance.”

The way federal prisoners file a grievance is antiquated. Prisoners write out complaints on carbon copy forms. It’s not uncommon to get rejected for not writing clearly –– through all four copies — or for filing too many copies or not enough copies.

There are specific rules and tight deadlines through four levels of appeal. The first form, called the BP-8, is a request for an informal resolution. A BP-8 form goes to a counselor or prison staffer — sometimes the person the prisoner is complaining about. One woman told us of filing about a guard who would open the shower curtain to watch her. When she filed a complaint, it was quickly shared with other guards.

If denied, the prisoner can file a BP-9 to the warden. The next appeal, a BP-10, goes to the Bureau of Prisons regional office and the fourth level, the BP-11, goes to BOP headquarters in Washington.

Many get turned down on technicalities, not the merits of a case. Doctors told Terri McGuire Mollica she needed surgery to remove a fibroid tumor — that grew to the size of a five-month pregnancy — but she was denied after prison officials failed to log in the appeal she’d sent by registered mail.

We talked to a prisoner who got rejected because he filled out the form with a pencil, not a pen. And we read, in court documents, about the woman who reported a guard for sexual abuse but was rejected because she misspelled his last name.

Randilee Giamusso, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons, told us that writing in pen or misspelling a name would not have been enough reason, alone, to reject a grievance. She added that the grievance system is set up to “solve problems and be responsive to issues raised by inmates.”

Many of the men and women we talked to suggested a simple fix: Let us file privately on computers.

But the low number of successful claims suggests prison officials don’t want to make it easier to file. One possible reason: A prisoner can’t take a complaint to court until they first complete every step of that internal prison grievance system.

Christie and I will file more stories soon on the failed grievance system, including a story about how prisoners —like Matthew Phillips — face retaliation when they try to complain.

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Pod Club

A sign on pavement that says “You’re on… Oklahoma US 66.”

Jaclyn Nash/National Museum of American History

Thanks for tuning in last week to the Throughline episode, which explored the evolving boundary between free speech and criminal threats.

Today, we’re listening to an episode of Here & Now Anytime about Route 66, which is known as “America’s Main Street,” though it isn’t the longest or most-traveled American highway. The road was fully paved in the 1930s and became a migration route during the Great Depression for poor farming families escaping the Dust Bowl in search of a new life in California. It has been highlighted in popular media for many years. Kathleen Franz, the lead curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, joins the podcast to explore the road's rich history in more detail. Listen to the episode here.

Do you have any significant memories about traveling the iconic Route 66? Listen to the episode and share your thoughts here. Your response could appear in next week's Sunday newsletter.

Love podcasts? For handpicked episode recommendations every week, check out Pod Club — a newsletter written FOR podcast fans BY podcast fans. Subscribe here!

And, on this week's episode of The Sunday Story from Up First, check out an exclusive 2-part series on the global scam industry from the scammers' point of view. In part one, take a look at who the scam workers are and how they ended up in Cambodia. In part two, with the ongoing crackdown on the industry, many workers are stranded on the street. A dive into whether they are being treated as criminals or victims of the industry.

B to the B to the B

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It's time for the Sunday Puzzle! NPR Puzzlemaster Will Shortz will provide you with two words starting with the letter B. You will then supply another word starting with B that can follow the first one and precede the second one, in each case to complete a compound word for a familiar two-word phrase. For example, if you are provided with “Boot, box,” your word could be “Black (bootblack, black box).” Test your skills here. Check the page later to hear the answers, or catch them live on Weekend Edition at 8:41 a.m. ET.

This week's online challenge comes from Evan Kalish, of Bayside, N.Y. Take the name of a nocturnal creature, in two words. The first word is a spooky sound. Move the last letter of the first word to the start of the second word and you'll get another spooky, nocturnal sound. What is the creature and what are the sounds? Submit your answer here, and you could win a chance to play next Sunday's on-air puzzle.

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