Category: Prison

58 articles in this category

Ali from Newark — The Black shot caller at FCI Loretto, near the end of a twenty-five-year drug sentence, who came to embrace John Kiriakou at the close of his term and tell him how much he respected him — a friendship possible only because Kiriakou had decided on arrival to ignore the prison's racial divisions.
The black box — The restraint apparatus in which John Kiriakou was moved from FCI Loretto to an outside medical appointment — handcuffs, leg irons, a waist chain and a steel box locked over the cuffs so the lock could not be picked — and the form he refused to sign because it required him to call everybody sir.
Chomo — The prison term for a child molester, which John Kiriakou first heard on his first day at FCI Loretto when two skinheads at the Aryan table put it to him as the last of three vetting questions before deciding whether he could eat with them.
Clickers and touchers — The distinction John Kiriakou says prisoners at FCI Loretto drew between convicted sex offenders who had only viewed images of children and those who had travelled across state lines to molest them, and his account of why they are all held at low security.
Clyde Hall — The imprisoned Ohio congressman John Kiriakou says served at his prison a few years before him, whose remark on release — that he had made some of the best friends of his life inside — Kiriakou thought insane at the time and came to understand after his own sentence.
The dog food memo — The internal announcement circulated by the warden of FCI Loretto apologising for having served prisoners dog food on a taco night, which John Kiriakou cites as evidence not of the error but of how bad the ordinary food was — because nobody noticed.
Domingo's television — John Kiriakou has used the television rooms at FCI Loretto as his sharpest illustration of prison segregation: sets owned by racial blocs since a riot in the 1990s, a seat in front of one costing fourteen dollars, and one set left tuned to Law & Order every morning because a man named Domingo had paid four hundred dollars for it and had been gone for years.
Federal prison security levels — The ladder of federal custody as John Kiriakou describes it — penitentiary, medium, low and minimum-security camp — the transfer rules that let long-sentence prisoners descend it, and why that placed dangerous men inside the low-security prison where he served his sentence.
Fifty new crimes a year — John Kiriakou's argument that the United States has become a carceral country by legislative accretion — fifty newly created federal crimes every year for two decades, on top of five per cent of the world's population holding twenty-five per cent of its prisoners.
Four deaths at Loretto — John Kiriakou's tally of the prisoners who died during his twenty-three months at FCI Loretto — four, all of preventable illness, two of heart attacks and two of cancer — and his account of one of them, a man he ate with daily who was given Tylenol for months before an outside x-ray found stage four spinal cancer.
James Morris — A close friend of John Kiriakou's who served seventeen years of a twenty-year sentence for a crime committed at sixteen, found on release that a violent felony conviction closed off employment, made his own way to Turkey and across the border into Syria, spent two years fighting alongside the Kurds against ISIS, and later took his own life.
Legal mail — The privileged correspondence category John Kiriakou used to smuggle the Letters from Loretto and the manuscript of his book out of prison — addressed to his attorney Jesselyn Radack and marked legal mail, which staff were forbidden to open.
Mental health as a disciplinary problem — John Kiriakou has said that before his own prosecution he never gave five seconds of thought to the American prison system, and that living inside it showed him a broken one — in particular a system in which mental health is treated as a disciplinary problem rather than a medical one.
The Nation of Islam at Loretto — The largest Muslim faction at FCI Loretto — African American converts to the Nation of Islam — two of whom walked into John Kiriakou's cell in his first days holding their own newspaper, in which Louis Farrakhan had called him a hero of the Muslim people for opposing torture. They told him he would have no trouble with them; one declined the handshake he offered, on the ground that he does not shake hands with the white devil. The Aryans, meanwhile, had decided he was a CIA assassin who killed Muslims. Kiriakou kept his mouth shut and let both beliefs stand.
Pakistani prisons — John Kiriakou's flat refusal, in a discussion of Imran Khan's detention, of the idea that a Pakistani prison offers VIP treatment to a former prime minister — grounded in his having visited many of them himself during the period when the CIA was locking people up there.
Passing time at Loretto — How prisoners at FCI Loretto filled days John Kiriakou describes as Groundhog Day — working out and watching television on a set of screens divided between factions, while Kiriakou himself read, answered mail and wrote a book.
The Pisces prison gang — The umbrella gang every Hispanic prisoner at FCI Loretto was required to join on pain of a beating — which subordinated street rivalries like MS-13, the Norteños and the Zetas to a single inside identity and required every member to work out daily against the possibility of a race riot.
Cell transfers at Loretto — How a prisoner at FCI Loretto moved from one cell to another — a process requiring six months in place, the written agreement of the receiving cell and the signature of the counselor, which John Kiriakou describes as a guard assigned to be a designated pain in the ass.
Cleanliness in prison — John Kiriakou's account of hygiene and order at FCI Loretto — where everybody showered daily on pain of a beating, everybody was constantly cleaning, and the rules on possessions and bedmaking left almost no room for clutter.
Depression in prison — John Kiriakou's account of the condition he says everybody inside has, and the three-part regime he set against it — eating right, exercising daily and finding a distraction — which in his own case meant more than a hundred books, 7,000 letters and a book written in longhand.
Prison nicknames — The naming convention John Kiriakou describes at FCI Loretto — where nearly every Black and Hispanic prisoner went by a nickname, most white prisoners did not, and the nickname rather than the legal name was what a man gave when signing up for the basketball tournament.
The Public Health Service in the prisons — John Kiriakou's contrast between the United States Public Health Service officers he worked with during fifteen years at the CIA, whom he found excellent, and the Public Health Service physician assistants he encountered as a prisoner at FCI Loretto, whom he describes as the dregs of the service — people dumped into the Bureau of Prisons because they could not work anywhere else in government.
The rat and pedophile table — The cafeteria table at FCI Loretto reserved for cooperating witnesses and sex offenders — a placement that also carried a ban from the television room, and which John Kiriakou describes as an outcome cooperators knew to expect before they agreed to testify.
Say five years — The first piece of prison advice John Kiriakou says he was given — from a Bonanno family captain, walking laps of the snowed-in basketball court at FCI Loretto — to tell anyone who asked that he was serving five years rather than the thirty months he actually had.
Seven thousand letters — The correspondence John Kiriakou conducted from FCI Loretto — 7,000 letters to 675 different people over 23 months, begun because of an unsolicited postcard of a rose that reached him four hours into his sentence.
Sewer trout — The name prisoners at FCI Loretto gave the fish served on Fridays — which John Kiriakou says arrived in boxes stacked illegally behind the serving line, marked Alaskan cod, product of China, and not for human consumption, feed use only.
Shot callers — The trusted representatives each faction at FCI Loretto appointed to mediate disputes — a system John Kiriakou credits with keeping violence rare in a low-security prison, and which he later manipulated to have a rival banished from his own table.
The body in the barrel — The exchange John Kiriakou reports having with a fellow prisoner who explained his conviction by saying the police had found a body in a barrel in his storage unit — and that a hundred people had access to the unit — to which Kiriakou's only reply was that he was not judging him.
The Bureau of Prisons answers to no one — John Kiriakou's summary of what he calls the hardest lesson of his incarceration: that the Bureau of Prisons sits under the Justice Department but is accountable to nobody in practice, disregarding what sentencing judges order and what its own prosecutors have agreed, and placing prisoners wherever it chooses.
The case against work camps — John Kiriakou, who asked to serve his own sentence at a minimum-security work camp and was sent to the prison across the street instead, came out of prison arguing that the camps should not exist at all — and, in the same breath, that some prisoners are dangerous enough that prisons certainly should.
The chapel rule — The chapel and the library at FCI Loretto were the two places child molesters could be certain of safety, because a correctional officer was always present; John Kiriakou, who worked in the chapel, has described the house rule against discussing your case there and the indignation with which it was met.
The CO who wanted the CIA — A young correctional officer at FCI Loretto once pulled John Kiriakou aside and asked in a whisper how to get into the CIA; when Kiriakou told him he was bright and did not belong there, the man explained that both his parents and his grandfather had been correctional officers and that his wife would never leave Loretto, a town of twelve hundred people.
The conscientious objectors book — A long out-of-print volume of interviews with American conscientious objectors, published around 1972 and given to John Kiriakou from the personal collection of an objector he was friendly with in prison — a book whose harrowing accounts of objectors sent to real federal prisons rather than to camps convinced him that refusing to serve was often more physically dangerous than serving.
The dandelion salad — The meal John Kiriakou assembled in the yard at FCI Loretto from foraged dandelions, commissary olive oil and sea salt, instant rice, a bouillon cube, peanuts, borrowed Sazón and a bag of chicken — which he calls the single most satisfying meal of his twenty-three months in prison.
The dorm as a reward — John Kiriakou's explanation that moving a federal prisoner from a cell to a dormitory is a privilege earned over time, and why Ghislaine Maxwell's rapid promotion to dormitory living made no sense to him.
The ex-prisoner at the Bureau of Prisons — John Kiriakou's approving account of the appointment of a former federal prisoner — recently released after five years on a drug conspiracy charge — as deputy director of the Bureau of Prisons, which he calls an inspired choice and one of the few things he has praised Donald Trump for.
The fifteen-minute call — How Marty Gottesfeld, held in the communications management unit at Terre Haute, allocated the single fifteen-minute telephone call he was permitted each week: an email to his wife, his two attorneys and John Kiriakou, with the call going to whoever answered first.
The forty-seven suffix — The last two digits of a federal prisoner number that, according to John Kiriakou, mark the holder as a member of an organised gang — and which the Italians at FCI Loretto carried along with MS-13, the Bloods, the Crips and the Mexican Mafia.
The four-day-old New York Times — In December 2014, reading a four-day-old copy of the New York Times that prison staff had already cut articles out of, John Kiriakou found an interview in which Edward Snowden said that watching Kiriakou's case and Thomas Drake's — and seeing that neither man backed down — had inspired him to go public.
The glass-eating prisoner — A case John Kiriakou cites from a 2015 New York Times Magazine investigation of federal solitary confinement: a prisoner held in the Special Housing Unit at the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado for roughly eighteen years who smashed his narrow cell window and ate the broken glass so that he would be taken to a hospital and could speak to another human being.
The guard booth rounds — John Kiriakou's account of federal prison staffing from the inside: rounds required every eight or fifteen minutes and performed once an hour or two, cameras that are down half the time, and a hiring standard he says amounts to a GED and no felony convictions.
The hierarchy of charges — How federal prisoners ranked one another by offence, in John Kiriakou's account — RICO at the top, usually with a murder conspiracy attached; wealthy white-collar convicts despised as soft; and arson, insurance fraud and mortgage fraud attracting no interest at all.
The job in the medical practice — The made-up job that carried John Kiriakou through his first months out of prison — invented for him by the parents of a friend, both physicians, so that he would have something — and the patched-together living that followed it, including a think-tank post that ended in a mass layoff after a year.
The Kurd from Terre Haute — An Iraqi Kurd who reached the modified communications management unit at FCI Loretto after four years inside the CMU at Terre Haute, and who told John Kiriakou that the only way out was to keep your mouth shut for years.
The Loretto camp mix-up — John Kiriakou's account of turning himself in at the federal work camp at Loretto, Pennsylvania as the court had ordered, being sent across the street to the prison to be processed, and then being handcuffed and walked into the prison itself — with nobody on the outside knowing where he was for five days.
The mailroom standoff — Told at FCI Loretto that he had no right to write to journalists, John Kiriakou printed the Bureau of Prisons regulations in the law library and laid them out in the mailroom until the staff gave up and sent the letter.
The mob vote for Trump — John Kiriakou's answer to a viewer asking whether he discussed politics with organised crime figures in prison: that he did, a great deal, that they love Donald Trump without qualification, and that the reason is a New York real estate developer's unavoidable daily contact with the unions the mob controls.
The modified CMU — The communications restrictions imposed on John Kiriakou at FCI Loretto after his Letter from Loretto was published by the Huffington Post. Staff called it a modified communications management unit: a five-day delay on incoming and outgoing email, live monitoring of his telephone calls rather than recording, and a prohibition on speaking Greek to his family.
The night the Snowden story broke — How John Kiriakou learned about Edward Snowden. Three months into his sentence at FCI Loretto, a cellmate who could not sleep was listening to Coast to Coast AM in the middle of the night and woke him. Kiriakou turned on his own radio and followed the story through the distant stations that reach central Pennsylvania after dark.
The persona in the first week — Five days into a sentence he had expected to serve at a minimum-security camp, John Kiriakou decided to fall back on his CIA training and adopt a deliberately aggressive exterior — reasoning that in a prison where the weak end up checking themselves into solitary for protection, he would rather be the man other people needed protection from.
The professor in the visiting room — John Kiriakou has credited the idea for his prison memoir to a university professor who visited him at FCI Loretto, listened to him tell stories across a visiting-room table, and told him that although the whole thing was by its nature depressing, the stories were good and there were lessons in them, and that he should write a book.
The psychology chairman's letter — Unsure how to deal with the child molesters who made up a large share of the population at FCI Loretto, John Kiriakou wrote to a professor friend for advice; the reply, from the chairman of a university psychology department, told him that pedophiles cannot be cured and that they talk about their crimes constantly because reliving them is itself gratifying.
The quarterback with a personal chef — The former New York Giants quarterback John Kiriakou says lived in the next row of cells at FCI Loretto — serving a long sentence for a Ponzi scheme, paying every prison gang $500 a month for his safety, and employing another prisoner to cook him three meals a day from food stolen out of the cafeteria.
The question about the showers — The single thing John Kiriakou says he most wanted to know before going to prison, and the lunch his attorneys arranged with a former George Washington University professor — himself recently released — to answer it.
The SHU loophole — John Kiriakou's warning about the American assurances given to British courts in the Julian Assange extradition case: prosecutors promised not to place him in a communications management unit but said nothing about the Special Housing Unit, and in Kiriakou's account a prison need only cite an overheard threat to hold a man in solitary indefinitely.
The sixty-five-cent arrangement — The deal John Kiriakou struck with the chaplain at FCI Loretto: rather than keep his 65-cents-an-hour janitor's wage, he asked to be kept on the books while the money went to the next man on the list, and to stop coming to work — which is how he found the time to write Doing Time Like a Spy.
The stinger — The improvised prison cooking rig John Kiriakou describes at FCI Loretto — a wall-plug faceplate wired to live current and dropped into a bucket of water — which produced restaurant-quality Italian food daily and, on one occasion, killed a correctional officer.
Three square meals and a warm bed — John Kiriakou has said he will never forget a remark he overheard from three men playing cards in an empty television room at FCI Loretto, who counted up the meals, the bed, the clothes, the television and the medical care they were given and concluded that the place was very nearly paradise.