Prison racial segregation
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Prison racial segregation is John Kiriakou's account of how rigidly American prisons divide by race and ethnicity, a shock, he says, "like walking into 1950s American South." One half of the cafeteria was entirely Black, admitted regardless of offense; the other was subdivided by "paper", offense type, into graduated tables of Aryans ("the good guys"), Italians, Native Americans and, at the end, sex offenders, informants and "the rats," with Hispanics seated among them. Kiriakou argues this does lasting harm: inmates are hardened toward violence, taught to hate other groups for years, then released with no new skills, over 50% re-offend, making society less safe, since nothing prepares them for the outside. He has written that federal prison amounts to a combination of "seventh grade, Lord of the Flies, and a mental institution."

First day: forming alliances

On his first day at FCI Loretto, two Aryan-affiliated inmates, one with a swastika tattoo covering his neck and face, the other with an obscenity tattooed on his eyelids, walked into his cell and demanded to know whether he was a "rat," a "fag," or a "chomo" (child molester). After he denied all three, one told him: "Okay, you can sit with the Aryans in the chow hall." Drawing on CIA tradecraft, Kiriakou made forging strategic alliances his first priority, the Aryan Brotherhood first, the Italian organized-crime inmates close behind, and says he had no trouble for the rest of his sentence. The Aryans accepted him because he was not a rat; the Italians adopted him because he shared their hatred of the FBI. Asked directly whether he ever had to "make his bones" in a fist fight, Kiriakou says he did not: "No. I minded my own business. I made alliances with all the mafia", which he ranks first among the racial groups in importance. The relationships outlasted the sentence; he mentions observing a moment of silence outside Nicodemo Scarfo's house in Atlantic City after his release, and stopping in Philadelphia for dinner with former inmates on his way home from interviews.

The Italian adoption was engineered by a fellow inmate, identified elsewhere as Mark Lanzelotti, who, on reading a New York Times article naming Kiriakou days before his arrival, went to every Italian inmate to argue that the CIA, unlike the FBI, "protected us from the Muslims," and that Kiriakou hated the FBI as much as they did; the Italians welcomed him and "adopted" him. That inmate, an Italian organized-crime figure who had been serving triple life without parole for a first-time nonviolent drug offense, later had his sentence cut to 30 years on appeal, an appeal Kiriakou wrote, and was released a year after Kiriakou. Kiriakou also earned goodwill among a Mexican drug gang after writing, without charge, the appeal of a member facing life in prison over an eight-ton cocaine bust.

Rumor mill: 'hitman' and 'hero'

A rumor spread among Aryan Brotherhood inmates that Kiriakou had been a CIA hitman who killed Muslims, and they took to calling him "the Muslim killer." He never corrected it. When one Aryan Brotherhood inmate finally confronted him directly and asked whether it was true, Kiriakou answered deliberately ambiguously: "It was wartime and we all did things we weren't proud of", an answer that satisfied him. At the same time, members of the Nation of Islam approached him at Loretto and handed him a newspaper article in which Louis Farrakhan called him "a hero of the Muslim people", telling him he would have no problems with them. Kiriakou let both contradictory rumors, Aryan "Muslim killer" and Nation of Islam "hero of the Muslim people", stand uncorrected.

Segregated by the numbers

Kiriakou says his prison's population broke down to roughly 50% Black, 30% Hispanic and 20% white, and that most of the white inmates were sex offenders. Access to the TV rooms tracked the same racial lines: white inmates controlled none of the sets, with Hispanic and Black inmates splitting control between them. He compares the overall system to "walking into 1950s America," with Black, Hispanic and white inmates eating separately, living in separate cell blocks, and pedophiles segregated apart from the rest. He attributes the racial ownership of the TVs specifically to a prison race riot in the 1990s, after which of six sets, three belonged to Hispanic inmates and three to Black inmates, leaving white inmates with none. Prison overall, he says, was divided along racial lines beyond just the cafeteria, separate TVs for Black, white and Hispanic inmates, and among whites a further split between the "good white guys" (Aryans and Italians) and "bad white guys" (pedophiles and informants).

See also

- Doing Time Like a Spy
- Private prison system
