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SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________
No. 15–339
_________________
MICHAEL ROSS, PETITIONER
v. SHAIDON
BLAKE
on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the fourth circuit
[June 6, 2016]
Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the
Court.
The Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PLRA)
mandates that an inmate exhaust “such administrative remedies as
are available” before bringing suit to challenge prison conditions.
42 U. S. C. §1997e(a). The court below adopted an
unwritten “special circumstances” exception to that provision,
permitting some prisoners to pursue litigation even when they have
failed to exhaust available administrative remedies. Today, we
reject that freewheeling approach to exhaustion as inconsistent
with the PLRA. But we also underscore that statute’s built-in
exception to the exhaustion requirement: A prisoner need not
exhaust remedies if they are not “available.” The briefs and other
submissions filed in this case suggest the possibility that the
aggrieved inmate lacked an available administrative remedy. That
issue remains open for consideration on remand, in light of the
principles stated below.
I
Respondent Shaidon Blake is an inmate in a
Maryland prison. On June 21, 2007, two guards—James Madigan and
petitioner Michael Ross—undertook to move him from his regular cell
to the facility’s segregation unit. According to Blake’s version of
the facts, Ross handcuffed him and held him by the arm as they left
the cell; Madigan followed close behind. Near the top of a flight
of stairs, Madigan shoved Blake in the back. Ross told Madigan he
had Blake under control, and the three continued walking. At the
bottom of the stairs, Madigan pushed Blake again and then punched
him four times in the face, driving his head into the wall. After a
brief pause, Madigan hit Blake one last time. Ross kept hold of
Blake throughout the assault. And when the blows subsided, Ross
helped Madigan pin Blake to the ground until additional
officersarrived.
Later that day, Blake reported the assault to a
senior corrections officer. That officer thought Madigan at fault,
and so referred the incident to the Maryland prison system’s
Internal Investigative Unit (IIU). Under state law, the IIU has
authority to investigate allegations of employee misconduct,
including the use of “excessive force.” Codeof Md. Regs., tit. 12,
§11.01.05(A)(3) (2006). After conducting a year-long inquiry into
the beating, the IIU issued a final report condemning Madigan’s
actions, while making no findings with respect to Ross. See App.
191–195. Madigan resigned to avoid being fired.
Blake subsequently sued both guards under 42
U. S. C. §1983, alleging that Madigan had used
unjustifiable force and that Ross had failed to take protective
action. The claim against Madigan went to a jury, which awarded
Blake a judgment of $50,000. But unlike Madigan, Ross raised the
PLRA’s exhaustion requirement as an affirmative defense, contending
that Blake had brought suit without first following the prison’s
prescribed procedures for obtaining an administrative remedy. As
set out in Maryland’s Inmate Handbook, that process—called, not
very fancifully, the Administrative Remedy Procedure (ARP)—begins
with a formal grievance to the prison’s warden; it may also involve
appeals to the Commissioner of Correction and then the Inmate
Grievance Office (IGO). See Maryland Div. of Correction, Inmate
Handbook 30–31 (2007). Blake acknowledged that he had not sought a
remedy through the ARP—because, he thought, the IIU investigation
served as a substitute for that otherwise standard process. The
District Court rejected that explanation and dismissed the suit,
holding that “the commencement of an internal investigation does
not relieve prisoners from the [PLRA’s] exhaustion requirement.”
Blake v.
Maynard, No. 8:09–cv–2367 (D Md., Nov. 14,
2012), App. to Pet. for Cert. 38, 2012 WL 5568940, *5.
The Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
reversed in a divided decision. Stating that the PLRA’s “exhaustion
requirement is not absolute,” the court adopted an extra-textual
exception originally formulated by the Second Circuit. 787
F. 3d 693, 698 (2015). Repeated the Court of Appeals: “[T]here
are certain ‘special circumstances’ in which, though administrative
remedies may have been available[,] the prisoner’s failure to
comply with administrative procedural requirements may nevertheless
have been justified.”
Ibid. (quoting
Giano v.
Goord, 380 F. 3d 670, 676 (CA2 2004)). In particular,
that was true when a prisoner “reasonably”—even though
mistakenly—“believed that he had sufficiently exhausted his
remedies.” 787 F. 3d, at 695. And Blake, the court concluded,
fit within that exception because he reasonably thought that “the
IIU’s investigation removed his complaint from the typical ARP
process.”
Id., at 700. Judge Agee dissented, stating that
the PLRA’s mandatory exhaustion requirement is not “amenable” to
“[j]udge-made exceptions.”
Id., at 703. This Court granted
certiorari. 577 U. S. ___ (2015).
II
The dispute here concerns whether the PLRA’s
exhaustion requirement, §1997e(a), bars Blake’s suit. Statutory
text and history alike foreclose the Fourth Circuit’s adoption of a
“special circumstances” exception to that mandate. But Blake’s suit
may yet be viable. Under the PLRA, a prisoner need exhaust only
“available” administrative remedies. And Blake’s contention that
the prison’s grievance process was not in fact available to him
warrants further consideration below.
A
Statutory interpretation, as we always say,
begins with the text, see,
e.g., Hardt v.
Reliance
Standard Life Ins. Co., 560 U. S. 242, 251 (2010) —but
here following that approach at once distances us from the Court of
Appeals. As Blake acknowledges, that court made no attempt to
ground its analysis in the PLRA’s language. See 787 F. 3d, at
697–698; Brief for Respondent 47–48, n. 20 (labeling the Court
of Appeals’ rule an “extra-textual exception to the PLRA’s
exhaustion requirement”). And that failure makes a difference,
because the statute speaks in unambiguous terms opposite to what
the Fourth Circuit said.
Section 1997e(a) provides: “No action shall be
brought with respect to prison conditions under section 1983 of
this title, or any other Federal law, by a prisoner confined in any
jail, prison, or other correctional facility until such
administrative remedies as are available are exhausted.” As we have
often observed, that language is “mandatory”: An inmate “shall”
bring “no action” (or said more conversationally, may not bring any
action) absent exhaustion of available administrative remedies.
Woodford v.
Ngo, 548 U. S. 81, 85 (2006) ;
accord,
Jones v.
Bock, 549 U. S. 199, 211 (2007)
(“There is no question that exhaustion is mandatory under the
PLRA”). As later discussed, that edict contains one significant
qualifier: the remedies must indeed be “available” to the prisoner.
See
infra, at 8–10. But aside from that exception, the
PLRA’s text suggests no limits on an inmate’s obligation to
exhaust—irrespective of any “special circumstances.”
And that mandatory language means a court may
not excuse a failure to exhaust, even to take such circumstances
into account. See
Miller v.
French, 530 U. S.
327, 337 (2000) (explaining that “[t]he mandatory ‘shall’
. . . normally creates an obligation impervious to
judicial discretion”). No doubt, judge-made exhaustion doctrines,
even if flatly stated at first, remain amenable to judge-made
exceptions. See
McKart v.
United States, 395
U. S. 185, 193 (1969) (“The doctrine of exhaustion of
administrative remedies . . . is, like most judicial
doctrines, subject to numerous exceptions”). But a statutory
exhaustion provision stands on a different footing. There, Congress
sets the rules—and courts have a role in creating exceptions only
if Congress wants them to. For that reason, mandatory exhaustion
statutes like the PLRA establish mandatory exhaustion regimes,
foreclosing judicial discretion. See,
e.g., McNeil v.
United States, 508 U. S. 106, 111, 113 (1993) (“We are
not free to rewrite the statutory text” when Congress has strictly
“bar[red] claimants from bringing suit in federal court until they
have exhausted their administrative remedies”). Time and again,
this Court has taken such statutes at face value—refusing to add
unwritten limits onto their rigorous textual requirements. See,
e.g., id., at 111;
Shalala v.
Illinois
Council on Long Term Care,
Inc., 529 U. S. 1 –14
(2000); see also 2 R. Pierce, Administrative Law Treatise §15.3, p.
1241 (5th ed. 2010) (collecting cases).
We have taken just that approach in construing
the PLRA’s exhaustion provision—rejecting every attempt to deviate
(as the Fourth Circuit did here) from its textual mandate. In
Booth v.
Churner, 532 U. S. 731 (2001) , for
example, the prisoner argued that exhaustion was not necessary
because he wanted a type of relief that the administrative process
did not provide. But §1997e(a), we replied, made no distinctions
based on the particular “forms of relief sought and offered,” and
that legislative judgment must control: We would not read
“exceptions into statutory exhaustion requirements where Congress
has provided otherwise.”
Id., at 741, n. 6. The next
year, in
Porter v.
Nussle, 534 U. S. 516, 520
(2002) , the Court rejected a proposal to carve out excessive-force
claims (like Blake’s) from the PLRA’s exhaustion regime, viewing
that approach too as inconsistent with the uncompromising statutory
text. And most recently, in
Woodford, we turned aside a
requested exception for constitutional claims. 548 U. S., at 91,
n. 2. Our explanation was familiar: “We are interpreting and
applying” not a judge-made doctrine but a “statutory requirement,”
and therefore must honor Congress’s choice.
Ibid.[
1] All those precedents rebut the Court
of Appeals’ adoption of a “special circumstances” excuse for
non-exhaustion.
So too, the history of the PLRA underscores the
mandatory nature of its exhaustion regime. Section §1997e(a)’s
precursor, enacted in the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons
Act (CRIPA), §7, 94Stat. 352 (1980), was a “weak exhaustion
provision.”
Woodford, 548 U. S., at 84. Under CRIPA, a court
would require exhaustion only if a State provided “plain, speedy,
and effective” remedies meeting federal minimum standards—and even
then, only if the court believed exhaustion “appropriate and in the
interests of justice.” §7(a), 94Stat. 352. That statutory scheme
made exhaustion “in large part discretionary.”
Nussle, 534
U. S., at 523. And for that reason (among others), CRIPA
proved inadequate to stem the then-rising tide of prisoner
litigation. In enacting the PLRA, Congress thus substituted an
“invigorated” exhaustion provision.
Woodford, 548
U. S., at 84. “[D]iffer[ing] markedly from its predecessor,”
the new §1997e(a) removed the conditions that administrative
remedies be “plain, speedy, and effective” and that they satisfy
minimum standards.
Nussle, 534 U. S., at 524. Still
more, the PLRA prevented a court from deciding that exhaustion
would be unjust or inappropriate in a given case. As described
earlier, see
supra, at 4–5, all inmates must now exhaust all
available remedies: “Exhaustion is no longer left to the discretion
of the district court.”
Woodford, 548 U. S., at 85.
The PLRA’s history (just like its text) thus
refutes a “special circumstances” exception to its rule of
exhaustion. That approach, if applied broadly, would resurrect
CRIPA’s scheme, in which a court could look to all the particulars
of a case to decide whether to excuse a failure to exhaust
available remedies. But as we have observed, such wide-ranging
discretion “is now a thing of the past.”
Booth, 532
U. S., at 739. And the conflict with the PLRA’s history (as
again with its text) becomes scarcely less stark if the Fourth
Circuit’s exception is confined, as the court may have intended, to
cases in which a prisoner makes a reasonable mistake about the
meaning of a prison’s grievance procedures. Understood that way,
the exception reintroduces CRIPA’s requirement that the remedial
process be “plain”—that is, not subject to any reasonable
misunderstanding or disagreement. §7(a), 94Stat. 352. When Congress
amends legislation, courts must “presume it intends [the change] to
have real and substantial effect.”
Stone v.
INS, 514
U. S. 386, 397 (1995) . The Court of Appeals instead acted as
though the amendment—from a largely permissive to a mandatory
exhaustion regime—had not taken place.[
2]
B
Yet our rejection of the Fourth Circuit’s
“special circumstances” exception does not end this case—because
the PLRA contains its own, textual exception to mandatory
exhaustion. Under §1997e(a), the exhaustion requirement hinges on
the “availab[ility]” of administrative remedies: An inmate, that
is, must exhaust available remedies, but need not exhaust
unavailable ones. And that limitation on an inmate’s duty to
exhaust—although significantly different from the “special
circumstances” test or the old CRIPA standard—has real content. As
we explained in
Booth, the ordinary meaning of the word
“available” is “ ‘capable of use for the accomplishment of a
purpose,’ and that which ‘is accessible or may be obtained.’ ”
532 U. S., at 737–738 (quoting Webster’s Third New International
Dictionary 150 (1993)); see also Random House Dictionary of the
English Language 142 (2d ed. 1987) (“suitable or ready for use”); 1
Oxford English Dictionary 812 (2d ed. 1989) (“capable of being made
use of, at one’s disposal, within one’s reach”); Black’s Law
Dictionary 135 (6th ed. 1990) (“useable”; “present or ready for
immediate use”). Accordingly, an inmate is required to exhaust
those, but only those, grievance procedures that are “capable of
use” to obtain “some relief for the action complained of.”
Booth, 532 U. S., at 738.
To state that standard, of course, is just to
begin; courts in this and other cases must apply it to the
real-world workings of prison grievance systems. Building on our
own and lower courts’ decisions, we note as relevant here three
kinds of circumstances in which an administrative remedy, although
officially on the books, is not capable of use to obtain relief.
See Tr. of Oral Arg. 27–29 (Solicitor General as
amicus
curiae acknowledging these three kinds of unavailability).
Given prisons’ own incentives to maintain functioning remedial
processes, we expect that these circumstances will not often arise.
See
Woodford, 548 U. S., at 102. But when one (or more)
does, an inmate’s duty to exhaust “available” remedies does not
come into play.
First, as
Booth made clear, an
administrative procedure is unavailable when (despite what
regulations or guidance materials may promise) it operates as a
simple dead end—with officers unable or consistently unwilling to
provide any relief to aggrieved inmates. See 532 U. S., at
736, 738. Suppose, for example, that a prison handbook directs
inmates to submit their grievances to a particular administrative
office—but in practice that office disclaims the capacity to
consider those petitions. The procedure is not then “capable of
use” for the pertinent purpose. In
Booth’s words: “[S]ome
redress for a wrong is presupposed by the statute’s requirement” of
an “available” remedy; “where the relevant administrative procedure
lacks authority to provide any relief,” the inmate has “nothing to
exhaust.”
Id., at 736, and n. 4. So too if
administrative officials have apparent authority, but decline ever
to exercise it. Once again: “[T]he modifier ‘available’ requires
the possibility of some relief.”
Id., at 738. When the facts
on the ground demonstrate that no such potential exists, the inmate
has no obligation to exhaust the remedy.
Next, an administrative scheme might be so
opaque that it becomes, practically speaking, incapable of use. In
this situation, some mechanism exists to provide relief, but no
ordinary prisoner can discern or navigate it. As the Solicitor
General put the point: When rules are “so confusing that
. . . no reasonable prisoner can use them,” then “they’re
no longer available.” Tr. of Oral Arg. 23. That is a significantly
higher bar than CRIPA established or the Fourth Circuit suggested:
The procedures need not be sufficiently “plain” as to preclude any
reasonable mistake or debate with respect to their meaning. See
§7(a), 94Stat. 352; 787 F. 3d, at 698–699;
supra, at 3,
6–8. When an administrative process is susceptible of multiple
reasonable interpretations, Congress has determined that the inmate
should err on the side of exhaustion. But when a remedy is, in
Judge Carnes’s phrasing, essentially “unknowable”—so that no
ordinary prisoner can make sense of what it demands—then it is also
unavailable. See
Goebert v.
Lee County, 510 F. 3d
1312, 1323 (CA11 2007);
Turner v.
Burnside, 541
F. 3d 1077, 1084 (CA11 2008) (“Remedies that rational inmates
cannot be expected to use are not capable of accomplishing their
purposes andso are not available”). Accordingly, exhaustion is not
required.
And finally, the same is true when prison
administrators thwart inmates from taking advantage of a grievance
process through machination, misrepresentation, or intimidation. In
Woodford, we recognized that officials might devise
procedural systems (including the blind alleys and quagmires just
discussed) in order to “trip[] up all but the most skillful
prisoners.” 548 U. S., at 102. And appellate courts have
addressed a variety of instances in which officials misled or
threatened individual inmates so as to prevent their use of
otherwise proper procedures. As all those courts have recognized,
such interference with an inmate’s pursuit of relief renders the
administrative process unavailable.[
3] And then, once again, §1997e(a) poses no bar.
The facts of this case raise questions about
whether, given these principles, Blake had an “available”
administrative remedy to exhaust. As explained earlier, Ross’s
exhaustion defense rests on Blake’s failure to seek relief through
Maryland’s ARP process, which begins with a grievance to the warden
and may continue with appeals to the Commissioner of Correction and
the IGO. See
supra, at 2–3; Inmate Handbook, at 30–31. That
process is the standard method for addressing inmate complaints in
the State’s prisons: The Inmate Handbook provides that prisoners
may use the ARP for “all types” of grievances (subject to four
exceptions not relevant here), including those relating to the use
of force.
Id., at 30; see App. 312. But recall that Maryland
separately maintains the IIU to look into charges of staff
misconduct in prisons, and the IIU did just that here. See
supra, at 2. Blake urged in the courts below that once the
IIU commences such an inquiry, a prisoner
cannot obtain
relief through the standard ARP process—whatever the Handbook may
say to the contrary. See 787 F. 3d, at 697; App. to Pet. for
Cert. 38, 2012 WL 5568940, at *5. And in this Court, that issue has
taken on new life. Both Blake and Ross (as represented by the
Maryland attorney general) have lodged additional materials
relating to the interaction between the IIU and the ARP. And
both sides’ submissions, although scattershot and in need of
further review, lend some support to Blake’s account—while also
revealing Maryland’s grievance process to have, at least at first
blush, some bewildering features.
Blake’s filings include many administrative
dispositions (gleaned from the records of other prisoner suits)
indicating that Maryland wardens routinely dismiss ARP grievances
as procedurally improper when parallel IIU investigations are
pending. One warden, for example, wrote in response to a prisoner’s
complaint: “Your Request for Administrative Remedy has been
received and is hereby dismissed. This issue has been assigned to
the Division of Correction’s Internal Investigative Unit (Case
#07–35–010621I/C), and will no longer be addressed through this
process.” Lodging of Respondent 1; see also,
e.g., id., at
18 (“Admin. Dismiss Final: This is being investigated outside of
the ARP process by I.I.U.”). In addition, Blake has submitted
briefs of the Maryland attorney general (again, drawn from former
prisoner suits) specifically recognizing that administrative
practice. As the attorney general stated in one case: “Wilkerson
filed an ARP request,” but “his complaint already was being
investigated by the [IIU], superceding an ARP investigation.”
Id., at 23–24; see also,
e.g., id., at 5 (Bacon’s
grievance “was dismissed because the issue had been assigned to
[the] IIU and would no longer be addressed through the ARP
process”).[
4]
And Ross’s own submissions offer some
confirmation of Blake’s view. Ross does not identify a single case
in which a warden considered the merits of an ARP grievance while
an IIU inquiry was underway. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 6 (Maryland
attorney general’s office conceding that it had found none). To the
contrary, his lodging contains still further evidence that wardens
consistently dismiss such complaints as misdirected. See,
e.g., Lodging of Petitioner 15 (District Court noting that
“Gladhill was advised that no further action would be taken through
the ARP process because the matter had been referred to the
[IIU]”). Indeed, Ross’ materials suggest that some wardens use a
rubber stamp specially devised for that purpose; the inmate, that
is, receives a reply stamped with the legend: “Dismissed for
procedural reasons . . . . This issue is being
investigated by IIU case number: ____. No further action shall be
taken within the ARP process.”
Id., at 25, 32, 38; see Tr.
of Oral Arg. 8–9 (Maryland attorney general’s office conceding the
stamp’s existence and use).
Complicating the picture, however, are several
cases in which an inmate refused to take a warden’s jurisdictional
“no” for an answer, resubmitted his grievance up the chain to the
IGO, and there received a ruling on the merits, without any
discussion of the ARP/IIU issue. We confess to finding these few
cases perplexing in relation to normal appellate procedure. See
id., at 3–10, 13–15, 18–20 (multiple Justices expressing
confusion about Maryland’s procedures). If the IGO thinks the
wardens wrong to dismiss complaints because of pending IIU
investigations, why does it not say so and stop the practice?
Conversely, if the IGO thinks the wardens right, how can it then
issue merits decisions? And if that really is Maryland’s
procedure—that when an IIU investigation is underway, the warden
(and Commissioner of Correction) cannot consider a prisoner’s
complaint, but the IGO can—why does the Inmate Handbook not spell
this out? Are there, instead, other materials provided to prisoners
that communicate how this seemingly unusual process works and how
to navigate it so as to get a claim heard?
In light of all these lodgings and the questions
they raise about Maryland’s grievance process, we remand this case
for further consideration of whether Blake had “available” remedies
to exhaust. The materials we have seen are not conclusive; they may
not represent the complete universe of relevant documents, and few
have been analyzed in the courts below. On remand, in addition to
considering any other arguments still alive in this case, the court
must perform a thorough review of such materials, and then address
the legal issues we have highlighted concerning the availability of
administrative remedies. First, did Maryland’s standard grievance
procedures potentially offer relief to Blake or, alternatively, did
the IIU investigation into his assault foreclose that possibility?
Second, even if the former, were those procedures knowable by an
ordinary prisoner in Blake’s situation, or was the system so
confusing that no such inmate could make use of it? And finally, is
there persuasive evidence that Maryland officials thwarted the
effective invocation of the administrative process through threats,
game-playing, or misrepresentations, either on a system-wide basis
or in the individual case? If the court accepts Blake’s probable
arguments on one or more of these scores, then itshould find
(consistent this time with the PLRA) that his suit may proceed even
though he did not file an ARP complaint.
III
Courts may not engraft an unwritten “special
circumstances” exception onto the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement.
The only limit to §1997e(a)’s mandate is the one baked into its
text: An inmate need exhaust only such administrative remedies as
are “available.” On remand, the court below must consider how that
modifying term affects Blake’s case—that is, whether the remedies
he failed to exhaust were “available” under the principles set out
here. We therefore vacate the judgment of the Court of Appeals and
remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this
opinion.
It is so ordered.
