Passing time at Loretto
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Passing time at Loretto is the practical problem John Kiriakou identifies as the real hardship of a sentence. In his account the worst part of prison is that it is Groundhog Day: every single day is just like every other day.

For most of the men at FCI Loretto, he says, the answer was working out and watching television.

The televisions

The television arrangement was factional. Kiriakou says the prison had eight sets, and that the Hispanic prisoners controlled four and the Black prisoners the other four.

He describes the programming with an explicit caveat that he hates to stereotype but that this is simply how it was. The four Black-controlled sets showed MTV, VH1, BET and a sports channel. The Hispanic-controlled sets showed Telemundo, another Spanish-language channel he could not recall, ESPN Deportes, and, for reasons he attributes to some long-departed prisoner's taste in soap operas, CBS.

The white prisoners did not get to choose.

Kiriakou says this did not much affect him, because he was not a big television watcher at the time: he did not watch Love and Hip Hop Atlanta, and he did not watch a Peru,Venezuela soccer match. So he read.

The arrangement had consequences beyond boredom. Kiriakou notes that violence at Loretto was relatively rare, and that most of what there was broke out over what to watch on television.

Working out

For many prisoners the answer was exercise every day. Kiriakou describes men who were nothing but rock-hard, knotted muscle, because there was nothing else to do but work out. Among the Hispanic prisoners it was not even optional: an unwritten rule of the Pisces prison gang required every member to work out daily.

Kiriakou's own solution

Kiriakou says he was fortunate. Four hours into his first day a stranger's postcard arrived, and he decided on the spot to answer every piece of mail he received, a decision that produced 7,000 letters to 675 people over 23 months and kept him very, very busy.

He was also writing. Doing Time Like a Spy started as a joke, he did not intend it as a book, but thought he would write down some of the more ridiculous and absurd things that happened.

He places reading in the same category, as a defence against depression in prison: a voracious reader anyway, he says he read well over a hundred books in 23 months.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- Seven thousand letters
- Prison Depression
- Doing Time Like a Spy
- The Pisces prison gang
