Prison tattoos
==============

Prison tattoos occupy an unusual place in John Kiriakou's account of FCI Loretto: they are the first thing he saw, the thing he was most often invited to acquire, and the one souvenir he refused.

The welcoming committee

His first morning began with two men walking into his cubicle. Kiriakou, telling himself he was trained for this, jumped up and put his fists up. The first was tall and pale with a swastika tattoo that took up his entire neck; the second small and fat, with a swastika and the words white power on his arms and a small skull on his left cheek. In another telling of the same morning, one man's neck carried the swastika and the other had an obscenity tattooed across his eyelids, so that every time he blinked it swore at you. Their questions, delivered while Kiriakou stood there with his fists raised, were the standard intake catechism of the compound, was he a homosexual, was he a rat, was he a child molester.

Lady Justice on the ground

One image stayed with him as argument rather than menace. A man he exercised with every day would take his shirt off in the summer, revealing an enormous tattoo across his back: Lady Justice, scales in hand and blindfold on, lying on the ground with her right arm raised to protect herself, while the tattoo's owner stood over her pointing a .45 and saying take that. Kiriakou laughed the first time he saw it, then concluded there was a great deal to it, there is no justice in a system that keeps people in solitary confinement for forty-three years.

Another prisoner he came to like was covered from neck to toes, including the palms of his hands; the tattoos were the only reason Kiriakou noticed him at all in the visiting room, and the man turned out to have been born and raised within twenty miles of the prison.

The refusal

Kiriakou says there was great pressure on him to get one, the standard suggestion being barbed wire around the arm. His answer was consistent: "I don't want to souvenir this place. I want to forget I was ever here." He suggested the man offering get the barbed wire himself.

The tattoo also became his shorthand for what the Bureau of Prisons actually wanted from him. Told by a staff member that he needed to "act more like an inmate", Kiriakou lost his temper: did that mean he should get a tattoo on his face? Did it mean he should steal food from the cafeteria and sell it around the compound?

See also

- FCI Loretto
- The Italians at Loretto
- Bureau of Prisons
- Solitary confinement
