Rhodes

We must resolve a legal quandary that only Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, could have imagined: Do the exhaustive efforts of an incarcerated prisoner to remedy myriad violations of his First Amendment rights demonstrate that his First Amendment rights were not violated at all?

I

Kavin Maurice Rhodes is currently imprisoned at California State Prison, Los Angeles County, in Lancaster, California. Proceeding pro se, he brings this § 1983 action against several correctional officers (“the officers”) at the California Correctional Institution (“CCI”) in Tehachapi, California, alleging that they repeatedly *1126 retaliated against him for exercising his First Amendment rights when he was previously incarcerated there.

A

Rhodes’s conflict with the officers has its genesis in the most unlikely of places: the servicing of his Canon typewriter. It seems that every time Rhodes shipped his typewriter for off-site repairs, he not only would discover “considerable ... new damage” upon its return, but correctional officer M. Robinson would intentionally delay sending Rhodes’s typewriter for further repairs. Angered by these actions, Rhodes eventually filed an inmate grievance…