🚨 ACTION: Don’t let “unsubstantiated” become a cover story

VADOC is already using OSIG’s Red Onion report as “vindication.” That is dangerous. In a closed system where grievances are unsafe or inaccessible, procedural failure gets laundered into “no evidence.”

Please don’t read and scroll. Use the action tools below to: (1) demand a narrow fix so oversight can function even when grievances fail, and (2) reject the “cover story” narrative and demand accountability.

Goal: break grievance-gated oversight and stop procedural shutdown from being treated like factual clearance.

When the OSIG Red Onion report was released, UPROAR members did not feel relief. We felt recognition — the kind that comes when a system produces exactly the outcome you warned it would.

Many of us read the report together. The dominant reactions were anger, grief, and exhaustion. Not because the report failed to “side with us,” but because it confirmed a pattern we have been documenting for years: extreme harm narrowed into procedural findings labeled “unsubstantiated,” while the people living under those conditions remain in danger.

This response is not a rejection of oversight. It is a refusal to let constrained oversight be mistaken for truth.

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This Outcome Was Forewarned — On the Record

Long before this report was issued, incarcerated people, families, and advocates warned that oversight gated by grievance exhaustion and DOC-controlled records would reproduce DOC outcomes.

We did not wait silently.

• Families testified at public stakeholder meetings and legislative hearings.
• UPROAR members confronted the Ombudsman directly about scope, access, and retaliation.
• Hundreds of Virginians sent letters to dozens of legislators, DOC officials, and OSIG officials documenting serious harm and the failure of the grievance process.
• At rallies on May 24, October 24, December 18, and January 4, we called — explicitly — for independent oversight with real investigatory authority, carrying forward demands first raised at the January 8, 2025 Capitol rally, where now-Senator Mike Jones and Delegate Holly Seibold spoke and where UPROAR members were present.

On October 2, 2025, an UPROAR member placed a copy of our Action Network letter — Urgent: End Torture, Retaliation, and Medical Neglect in Virginia Prisons — directly into Ombudsman Andrea Sapone’s hands. The warnings were specific. The documentation was concrete. The failures were named.

On October 9, 2025, UPROAR members and loved ones testified before the Virginia Corrections Oversight Committee, entering those warnings into the formal legislative record.

This report was issued after that notice — not before it.

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“Unsubstantiated” Is Not Neutral in a Closed System

The report repeatedly characterizes allegations of racism, retaliation, medical and mental-health neglect, prolonged isolation, and inhumane conditions as “unsubstantiated” or “inconclusive.”

For families and incarcerated people, that language does not land as neutrality.

In high-control environments like Red Onion:

• filing grievances can trigger retaliation;
• lockdowns and restrictive housing make reporting impossible;
• communication cutoffs isolate people from outside help;
• grievances are delayed, rejected, downgraded, or never logged.

When a system operates this way, the absence of escalated grievances is not evidence of safety. It is often evidence of fear, futility, or enforced silence.

Treating non-escalation as evidentiary weakness turns the system’s own failures into a shield.

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Oversight Was Put on Notice — and Still Narrowed Its Lens

UPROAR engaged the Ombudsman’s office in good faith. We exhausted engagement before escalating publicly.

Yet the report shows that:

• DOC-generated records remained the primary evidentiary foundation;
• staff denials and partial video were treated as neutral arbiters;
• external documentation and third-party accounts were structurally devalued;
• grievance exhaustion continued to function as a gate, even where grievance use is unsafe or meaningless.

Independent civil-rights attorneys have since underscored this problem, noting that drawing conclusions about medical neglect without reviewing medical records, and limiting interviews and scope, undermines the reliability of the findings. Families recognized this immediately: the investigation could not see what the system prevents from being recorded.

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The Law Already Required More Than This

Virginia law does not envision oversight as narrowly as this report reflects.

Under § 53.1-17.2, the Ombudsman is charged not only with responding to complaints, but with monitoring conditions of confinement, documenting facility conditions, and reviewing whether the grievance process itself is accessible, timely, and unbiased. Grievance failure is not meant to block oversight — it is explicitly a subject of oversight.

Under § 53.1-17.6, the Office is authorized to conduct full facility inspections assessing conditions of confinement, lockdown history, medical care, staffing, assaults, deaths, and grievance accessibility, followed by public reports, safety classifications, corrective action plans, and follow-up inspections.

The Red Onion report did not take that form. It was not a facility inspection with enforceable follow-up. It did not issue a safety classification. It did not require a corrective action plan. It did not assess systemic conditions over time. It was a complaint-bounded review operating inside narrow evidentiary limits — even though the law allows, and anticipates, far more.

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Why the Grievance Gate Keeps Reproducing This Result

The structural choke point we warned about is written directly into § 53.1-17.7.

That section requires the Ombudsman to decline investigations when grievances have not been exhausted, unless incarcerated people can prove legitimacy, good-faith exhaustion, and procedural impediment — even in environments where filing grievances is dangerous or futile.

This makes grievance failure a gatekeeper for oversight rather than a trigger for it.

The Red Onion report demonstrates exactly how this structure operates in practice: the most serious harms are filtered out before they ever become “reviewable,” and what survives the pipeline is then treated as the universe of truth.

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The Danger Is How This Report Is Already Being Used

Our concern is not only the report’s limits, but how quickly it is being treated as closure.

Within days of release:

• VADOC claimed “vindication”;
• media summaries emphasized “unsubstantiated” findings;
• redactions, scope limits, and inconclusive determinations faded into the background.

For families whose loved ones are still locked down, denied care, or retaliated against for speaking out, this is terrifying. We have seen this cycle before: narrow investigations followed by institutional relief, while conditions on the inside remain unchanged.

A report that cannot see systemic harm becomes a tool to deny it.

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What This Report Actually Demonstrates

Read accurately, the Red Onion report demonstrates that:

• grievance exhaustion is an unreliable proxy for truth where reporting is dangerous or inaccessible;
• oversight that remains downstream of DOC processes cannot be meaningfully independent;
• “inconclusive” findings in a closed system are warning signals, not reassurance;
• procedural failure is still being mistaken for absence of harm.

These are structural problems. They will repeat unless the structure changes.

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Our Position Going Forward

UPROAR does not claim this report was issued in bad faith. But we do say this plainly:

If oversight cannot investigate serious harm unless the grievance system functions — and the grievance system fails most where harm is greatest — then oversight will continue producing reports that feel final while danger continues.

That is why we are advancing a narrow legislative clarification of the Ombudsman’s authority: to align investigatory power with the duties the law already assigns, ensure that serious allegations are reviewable even when the grievance process is unsafe or inaccessible, and prevent procedural breakdown from being publicly misread as factual clearance.

We warned this would happen. We said it publicly. We said it on the record.

We read this report with anger because we recognize the pattern. We read it with grief because we know the cost. And we respond with determination because we refuse to let this be the last word.

Take action

Amendment first (priority), then accountability. If a widget doesn’t render, use the backup link under it.

Petition 1 (Priority): Amend Va. Code § 53.1-17.7 — independent oversight when grievances fail

Narrow fix: empower the Corrections Ombudsman to investigate serious harm even when the grievance system is unsafe, inaccessible, or nonfunctional.

Petition 2: Reject the “unsubstantiated” cover story — demand accountability

OSIG’s report is already being treated as vindication. This petition rejects the idea that “unsubstantiated” equals “nothing happened” in a closed system.

Take Action with UPROAR

If your loved one is facing abuse inside

If you have a family member or friend in a Virginia prison who is facing abuse, neglect, retaliation, or other harm, please let us know so we can document it and connect you with support.

👉 Submit an incident report:

Grievance and Incident Report Form

If you or someone you know is a potential whistleblower

We also need information from people who see abuse from the “other side of the wall” — DOC employees and contractors, medical staff, and hospital workers who treat incarcerated patients.

Think about who in your network might be in that position and could safely, anonymously share what they know.

🕵️ Share or use our VADOC Whistleblower Form:
https://bit.ly/vadoc-whistleblower

Stay Connected with UPROAR

📬 Join our email updates list:
https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/uproar-updates

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https://bit.ly/join-uproar

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