Clickers and touchers
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Pressing a guest on why Jeffrey Epstein had been treated differently from ordinary federal sex offenders, John Kiriakou grounded the question in the population he had lived among for twenty-three months at FCI Loretto.

The proportion

He has said on other podcasts, he noted, that fully one third of the inmates at the prison where he served after blowing the whistle on the CIA torture programme were convicted paedophiles, a figure he immediately revised upward in the same sentence to 35 per cent. The two figures are given consecutively and he does not reconcile them.

The vocabulary

Within that population, he says, prisoners drew a distinction of their own, with a vocabulary to match. There were "clickers", those who had only looked at pictures of children, and "touchers", people who had actually travelled across state lines to molest children.

His judgement on their sentences is not the one his interlocutor might have expected from a critic of federal sentencing. The sentences these men had were draconian, he said, "and rightfully so." He mentions knowing one man serving sixty years.

Why they are all at low security

Kiriakou also explains the security classification, which is the point on which the whole Epstein comparison turns for him. Such prisoners cannot go to a minimum-security camp, he says, because they will abscond. They cannot go to a medium or a maximum, because there they will be killed, "people will beat them to death." So they are all held in low-security prisons.

That rule is what makes the treatment of Epstein's associate anomalous in his account, and it is why he raises the categories at all: if it is routine to sentence a convicted paedophile to twenty, twenty-five or thirty years and hold him at low security, he says, he does not understand why Epstein is being looked at differently even after death.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- FCI Loretto
- Chomo
- Jeffrey Epstein
