The prison food economy
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Kiriakou describes an elaborate informal food economy at FCI Loretto running parallel to, and largely replacing, the official cafeteria. The currency was books of postage stamps and packets of mackerel.

The stinger

Cooking was done in a bucket of water heated by a device called a stinger: wires stripped from an iron or a lamp, attached to two squares of metal, taken from the prison metal shop or prised off a wall as a faceplate, separated so that the user is not shocked. Food was sealed in plastic bags and steamed in the bucket. Garlic was sliced with a blade broken out of the single-edge disposable razor issued in the hygiene packs given to prisoners too poor to afford commissary, a technique Kiriakou notes is exactly the scene from Goodfellas, which he says was a thousand per cent true.

Where the food came from

Kiriakou is explicit that the supply chain ran through the staff. It was not only corrupt guards bringing food in from outside, he says, but guards working in the kitchen, officers whose job was to guard the prisoners cooking the food, and who were instead stealing the best of it and selling it on.

He describes a kitchen officer being fired and escorted out within a week or two of his arrival for allowing prisoners working in the cafeteria to steal food, in exchange for sexual acts; the officer was permitted to keep his pension, which Kiriakou describes as not acceptable. Afterwards the searches tightened, and prisoners were frisked on leaving the cafeteria in case they were carrying an apple or a pat of butter.

Effects

The cooking was good enough that Kiriakou says he would have paid thirty-five dollars for the equivalent meal in an Italian restaurant outside, and that he would eat until full at one cell and then return for a second sitting two hours later. He gained 35 pounds during his sentence. When the warden remarked that he was putting on a lot of weight, Kiriakou asked whether he was his tailor or his warden, and the warden walked away.

He served 23 months, and for the last six or eight months of that he never went to the cafeteria at all, there being no reason to.

One meal he singles out is the gourmet dinner cooked for his fiftieth birthday by a fellow prisoner, Mark Lanzalotti, who threw him a large party. Kiriakou told his wife that night that it was the first time he had smiled in nine months.

Other contraband economies

Alcohol was produced by fermenting fruit stolen from the cafeteria, mostly by the Native American prisoners, and hidden in the drop ceiling of the television room so that it could not be attributed to any one person. When a batch was discovered during the NBA playoffs, the punishment was collective: the televisions were switched off and nobody was allowed to watch basketball for a week.

Tobacco followed a similar pattern. Guards chewed tobacco in violation of the rules and spat it on the ground; prisoners collected it, dried it, rolled it in toilet paper and sold it for a packet of mackerel, and other prisoners smoked it.

"Not for human consumption"

Kiriakou's summary of the food is a single claim: "American prisoners aren't even fed human grade food." The evidence he offers for it is what was printed on the boxes: "I remember passing boxes, cases of food in the cafeteria, marked not for human consumption, feed use only, or for sale only in China."

He raised it in February 2015 as one of the two conditions the book he was then writing was about, the other being the medical care, which he rated worse.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- The Italians at Loretto
- Correctional officers at FCI Loretto
- Doing Time Like a Spy
