Paul Wright
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Paul Wright is a former prisoner and the co-creator of Prison Legal News, which John Kiriakou describes as the longest-running newspaper or magazine produced by and for current and former prisoners in American history.

Kiriakou uses the magazine's reporting as the evidentiary backbone of his case against the Bureau of Prisons' administrative remedy process. He cites a July 2014 article in Prison Legal News, on a study by the US Marshals Service and the University of Maryland's Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, which found that the failure of BOP officials to respond adequately to grievances contributes to higher levels of violence in federal prisons, while the system's real benefit to the bureau is deflecting litigation, since many federal courts have ruled in its favour on the ground that prisoners failed to exhaust administrative remedies.

The same research, as he quotes it, found that two features of the grievance process consistently predicted violence: the proportion of responses that were late, and the proportion substantively rejected. Kiriakou's question follows directly: is the bureau really worried about violence, "or are they worried about maintaining a regimen of bullshit and corruption?"

He also credits Prison Legal News for reporting that the European Court of Human Rights refused to extradite a terrorism suspect from the United Kingdom to the United States on the ground that his mental and physical health would significantly deteriorate in the more hostile American prison system.

Kiriakou has written for the magazine and campaigned alongside it on the practices it exposes, among them the fee-loaded debit cards issued in place of leftover commissary balances at release.

Thirty minutes every Thursday

Before he was a source, Wright was a colleague. Kiriakou ran a weekly thirty-minute segment called Criminal Injustice on which Wright was the standing guest, "every Thursday for 30 minutes we would talk about crooked cops, crooked prosecutors, crooked judges", prison conditions, medical care, prison food, for-profit prisons, sentencing reform, and cases like the fourteen people who died of heat stroke in Texas prisons in a single year because the state refused to air-condition them. The other regular was the independent journalist Kevin Gosztola.

Weakening democracy

The segment produced the piece of press Kiriakou has kept as a souvenir. The Washington Post assigned a reporter to listen to the show, and then published, by his account, that everything he said was true, but that by saying it on a Russian network he was weakening American democracy. The paper's framing of three Americans discussing corruption in their own judicial system was that it was an example of Russian propaganda interfering in that system.

Kiriakou's answer was to point at the subject matter rather than the transmitter: it was not the broadcast that weakened democracy but "the crooked judge who took bribes to send juveniles to a for-profit prison so he could line his pockets."

See also

- Prison Legal News
- Administrative remedy process
- Bureau of Prisons
- Medical care in federal prison
- Kiriakou and Russian media
