The Club Fed myth
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Having described the manipulation and the violence of his own two years inside, John Kiriakou was told by an interviewer in 2025 that the account was really dark. His answer was that it is an ugly place, and that he had not meant to leave his host speechless. 

'Prison is prison'

What followed was a short, unhedged rejection of a phrase he says he hates. There is no such thing as Club Fed, he said. Prison is prison. There's no such thing as Club Fed. You are not going to play golf or tennis or do gardening. You are in prison, where they humiliate you, they emasculate you, and they make you count the days until you can get out.  

And even then, he added, you are not really free, a claim he then unpacked into the years of probation and the travel bans recorded in supervised release travel restrictions. 

The distinction he does draw

Kiriakou is not arguing that all federal custody is identical; he is arguing that the soft version people picture does not exist. He describes the minimum security work camps in detail, no bars on the windows, unlocked doors, most inmates working in town at the local university, everyone on their honour not to run away, precisely because that is the sentence the judge recommended for him and the prosecutors did not oppose, and it is not what he got.   Instead he was walked round to the back of the actual prison, and when he objected that he was supposed to be at the camp across the street, the guard laughed at him and said not according to my paperwork, you're not. 

He uses the same distinction to make a point about who ends up where. Ghislaine Maxwell, he notes, has minimum security even though people convicted of child sex offences are not permitted in minimum security camps, so, he says, figure that out.  Told that Jeffrey Epstein had got the camp deal, Kiriakou corrected the record: he got better, he got house arrest, in his own home. 

See also

- Kiriakou's prison designation
- FCI Loretto
- Supervised release travel restrictions
- Ghislaine Maxwell
- Jeffrey Epstein
- Kiriakou on mass incarceration
- Doing Time Like a Spy
