Education at FCI Loretto
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In a letter from Loretto dated 2 February 2014, Kiriakou attacked the premise of the term "Federal Correctional Institution." It implies, he wrote, that the government is in some way correcting the behaviour of the prisoners held there, and in truth that is a bad joke: nothing is corrected at Loretto.

What was on offer

There was no therapy for anyone other than drug addicts nearing the end of their sentences. The only classes taught by staff were GED preparation and English as a second language for the roughly 400 foreign nationals serving drug sentences, a provision Kiriakou criticised on the grounds that after deportation, English would make it easier to re-enter the United States and restart a criminal enterprise. Anyone who already held a high school diploma was, in his phrase, out of luck.

Good conduct time

Prisoners receive a maximum of 47 days off their sentence for each year served. Kiriakou notes that Congress actually mandated 52 days a year, and that the Bureau of Prisons declined to comply. Because prisoner-taught classes, creative writing, introductory Spanish, the history of Western film, carried no tangible benefit, the only incentive to behave was negative: avoiding the loss of good time. The routes to collecting it were to obtain a GED, to be working toward one, or simply to stay out of trouble.

The drug programme

Prisoners with drug cases and no violence or firearms in the record could be sent to the nearest prison hosting the residential programme and complete 500 hours of classroom work for up to a year off the sentence. Kiriakou reports that the 40-hour preparatory class was in practice about ten hours and consisted solely of watching episodes of the A&E programme Intervention.

The structural criticism he makes is that an addict entering prison must detoxify unaided and then wait until near the end of the sentence to receive any counselling at all, a wait that can run five, ten or thirty years.

The quantum physics class

Kiriakou's central example of the department's supervision is a prisoner-led class scheduled under the title Quantum Physics. Nobody checked whether the prisoner teaching it was qualified, and no lesson plan was requested. The teacher's only degree, Kiriakou reports, was from a circus clown college, and the course had nothing to do with physics: it was, in his description, a self-help session for prisoners convicted of sex offences against children, conducted to the theme from Rocky, which one prisoner who had expected to learn physics loudly abandoned.

He reports quitting a prisoner-led introductory Spanish class after three sessions with his cellmate Dave, on the grounds that it had become a social gathering for the same group.

What he says he did learn

Kiriakou closed the argument in a later letter with an inventory of what prison had actually taught him: how to cook methamphetamine, how to smuggle drugs across international borders undetected, how to steal food from the cafeteria and cook a full meal using a live electrical wire and a bin of water, how to make cigarettes from guards' discarded chewing tobacco, how to self-medicate in lieu of real care, how to set up a Ponzi scheme, and how to defraud mortgage companies and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the last of these having been another prisoner-led class.

His serious conclusion is that the absence of counselling, rehabilitation and training is a long-term problem for society, which is accumulating a large population of uneducated, untrained and unreformed former prisoners with no employment prospects who will do what they know how to do.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- Letter from Loretto
- Bureau of Prisons
- Kiriakou on mass incarceration
