The dorm as a reward
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When his guest described Ghislaine Maxwell being "bumped up to dormitory living very quickly" at her first prison in Florida, and called it a miscarriage of justice, John Kiriakou supplied the institutional detail that made the point land.

How the move works

Inmates promoted to dormitory living, the guest said, have normally been there a while, have been exemplary prisoners and are coming close to their release date. Kiriakou agreed and filled in what the promotion actually consists of.

"The idea that she was bumped up to a dorm, which is a reward that you get," he said. "You leave an actual cell, you go into a dorm, dorm has TVs all around, you're free to come and go. You get that as a reward. And the fact that she got it just doesn't make any sense to me."

The alternative he describes

Immediately before, Kiriakou had raised a different disposition, at the other end of a sentence. He described what he called community incarceration: after prisoners serve their sentences, they can be kept on the grounds of the prison in a mobile home, "semi-free." They are not in the prison, there is no count time, and they cannot be punished additionally, but they are not allowed outside the gates.

The two descriptions bracket the same point. The federal system has a fine-grained ladder of privilege and restriction, understood by the people inside it, and movement along that ladder is legible: it is earned, or it is granted for a reason.

Why it matters to his argument

Kiriakou's interest throughout the interview was in anomalies that could not be explained by the ordinary operation of the Bureau of Prisons. He had already argued that a convicted sex offender is not eligible for minimum security at all, and that only the attorney general can order such a transfer. The dormitory point is the same argument at a smaller scale: a privilege whose normal price is time and good conduct, granted without either.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Ghislaine Maxwell
- Bureau of Prisons
- Civil confinement
- Maxwell at a work camp
