The Witness Log
Write it down while
you still remember it.
When something happens to someone inside a prison or jail, the useful thing is almost never a post. It is a dated, specific, first-hand record in the hands of an office with the legal power to act. This page helps you make that record and tells you exactly where to send it.
Nothing here is published, and no facility is named anywhere on this site because of what you write. If you want your account added to the public record being built on one specific facility, that is a different tool and a different decision — see The Watch.
- Do not fill this out from inside a facility. Prison email, tablet messaging, phone calls, and mail are monitored, and courts have said so plainly. People have faced retaliation for reporting conditions. Have someone on the outside do this.
- This is not a grievance and it does not preserve your rights. Federal law requires a prisoner to exhaust the facility's own grievance process before suing about conditions (42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a)). Filing here does not count, and missing the facility's deadline can destroy a case. File the facility's grievance, on time, and keep your date-stamped copy.
- Nothing here is published. This page does not run a public database of allegations and does not name officers or facilities anywhere. The record it builds belongs to you.
- Write what you know, not what you concluded. Naming an individual officer as having done something you did not personally witness carries real legal risk for you — line staff are not public figures. Describe what happened, when, and who told you.
- Do not name the incarcerated person unless you have their permission, or you are their next of kin or their attorney. Naming someone can put them at risk. The record works without a name.
1. Tell it in your own words
Write it the way you would tell a lawyer. Do not worry about format. Stick to what you actually know — if you were told something secondhand, write that you were told it. A record that separates what you saw from what you heard is far harder to dismiss.
2. Who should see this
This is the only multiple-choice question, and it is here to route you — not to characterize anyone. Pick what fits so the page can name the right offices.
3. Where, and who you are
Used only to name the right state offices below.
Where it should go
The doors that actually open
These are bodies with legal standing, investigative authority, or attorney-client privilege — things a website does not have. Send your record to them, not only to us.
Angela's team can help you understand what you are looking at and can put weight behind a case publicly. That is not a substitute for a lawyer, and this suite is not the place your legal rights get preserved — the grievance process and these offices are.
Two tools, on purpose
Private record here. Public record next door.
The suite deliberately splits this in two, because they carry different risk and they are different decisions for you to make.
- The Witness Log — this page — publishes nothing. It names no facility and no officer anywhere. It builds your dated account, on your own device, and points you at the offices with investigative power. This is the default, and for most people it is the right one.
- The Watch builds a public record against one named facility. That is a real escalation and it only makes sense where there is already a case, a hearing, or a press corps attached — which is why it opens with one campaign rather than an open database.
What neither one does is publish an allegation against a named individual officer. Republishing someone else's allegation carries its own liability, and line staff are not public figures — a claim about a named officer is held to a far lower bar than one about a facility or an agency. Both pages say the same thing: name the institution, describe the conduct, and do not assert what a person is.
Neither page replaces the ACLU National Prison Project, the DOJ Civil Rights Division's Special Litigation Section, or your state's protection and advocacy agency. Those have subpoena and records power, and the point of both tools is to route into them — not to compete with them. And neither one preserves your legal rights: only the facility's own grievance process, filed on time, does that.