Bureau of Prisons
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The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is the agency that ran John Kiriakou's 2013,2015 incarceration at FCI Loretto and a recurring subject of his prison writing and advocacy since.

"A threat to the public safety"

Kiriakou expected to serve his sentence at the minimum-security camp, no fences, no locked gates, work in town. The Bureau said no. The officer who processed him explained that the BOP had deemed him "a threat to the public safety": he would serve the entire sentence in the actual prison across the street, with the guard towers and concertina wire. The lesson, he says, is that sentencing judges can only make recommendations, the Bureau of Prisons has ultimate authority over where a prisoner goes. The decision produced his prison blog: Americans, he decided, had no idea what life inside was actually like.

"An employment agency"

Citing criminal-justice professor Peter Moskos's In Defense of Flogging, which he read inside, Kiriakou endorses the book's description of the BOP as "little more than an employment agency for unemployable semi-literate rural white men", ex-military men who couldn't get hired by the local police department, in prisons deliberately sited in the middle of nowhere. Many Loretto guards were second- and third-generation, parents and grandparents had worked, and in some cases still worked, the same prison. His reform prescriptions: real salaries that attract people with choices, and psychological screening of applicants.

Medical neglect

Kiriakou calls the BOP "a dumping ground for failed medical professionals" and argues the incentives are lethal: it is easier, and cheaper, for the Bureau for a prisoner to die in custody than to treat him over time. Prisoners claiming illness are routinely dismissed as "malingering." The one Loretto doctor prisoners spoke highly of resigned six months into Kiriakou's sentence, telling him the BOP would not allow him to treat prisoners properly, meaning send them to outside specialists.

He pressed the same case publicly for Jeffrey Sterling, who was denied heart medication despite repeated complaints to the BOP's regional and national offices, and was put in solitary for three days for being "rude to a guard."

The internal grievance ladder, as Kiriakou describes it: try to resolve the complaint, then file a BP-9 to the warden, a BP-10 to the regional director, and a BP-11 to BOP headquarters in Washington, a process he illustrates with a prisoner whose bleeding hemorrhoid earned him Tylenol and a brush-off.

Diesel therapy and the 1,600 calls

When the Bureau contemplated silencing Kiriakou's prison letters by putting him in "diesel therapy", endless transfers between prisons in transportation status, supporters flooded the BOP director's office with phone calls. The Bureau logged 1,600 of them. A dozen House members and two senators wrote in, inquiring about his well-being and warning against the transfer. It infuriated the officials, but they backed off, the warden, the assistant warden, and most importantly the guards kept their hands off him. "I knew that I was Teflon after that," he says.

Petty economics

Other BOP practices Kiriakou singles out: release fees so onerous that a prisoner's commissary money effectively ends up with Chase Manhattan or the Bureau itself, and a kosher meal program with no halal equivalent for Muslim prisoners, the Bureau's stated reason being that halal would be too expensive.

Designation in practice

The Bureau's designation authority is one of the mechanisms John Kiriakou returns to most often, because it operated against him. A judge sentenced him to a minimum-security work camp with no objection from the prosecution, and the Bureau placed him in the low-security prison across the street instead; the officer processing him summarised the position as "not according to my paperwork." His attorneys estimated two years to get a motion heard.

He pairs that with the rules the Bureau states for itself: no sex offenders in minimum security, because camps have no fences, no window bars and unlocked doors; paedophiles to low security, on the reasoning that they would not survive a maximum and would be beaten in a medium. Applied consistently, those rules make Ghislaine Maxwell's camp placement inexplicable.

Kiriakou's assessment

Kiriakou's summary judgement on the Bureau hardened during his sentence. Until he received the regional director's letter explaining that his security designation was based on his "total offensive behavior" rather than his conviction, he says he had believed many Bureau officials were either lazy or stupid. His revised conclusion was that they are malicious in addition to being lazy and stupid, and malicious above all.

The general principle he draws is that any monolithic bureaucracy will tend toward corruption without proper oversight, and that the Bureau's own oversight mechanisms, the administrative remedy process and Inspector General referrals, are not oversight at all.

He also extends the charge beyond the Bureau. Whether it is the CIA, the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons or the Justice Department, his position is that they are all criminal organisations, and his supporting argument is about incentives: the FBI does not get promoted by not arresting people, and Justice Department prosecutors do not get promoted by not prosecuting them. They see themselves eventually as U.S. attorneys, members of Congress, governors or partners in A-list law firms, and none of those destinations is reached by declining to prosecute.

Congressional pressure over diesel therapy

Kiriakou cites his own case as evidence that letters to elected representatives reach the Bureau. "A dozen House members and two senators wrote to the Bureau of Prisons inquiring about my well-being, and threatening them not to put me in what was called diesel therapy, which was to transfer me to different prisons around the country to silence me. And it was only because people were writing letters to their congressmen. These congressmen really are receptive."

He adds a procedural point from having worked both chambers: the letters that move a member are the ones from that member's own constituents. "I live in Virginia. If I write to a senator from South Dakota, he's not going to care. But if somebody from South Dakota writes, they're going to jump to attention."

"Inmate Kiriakou never gave up his First Amendment rights"

Offered a job at the Institute for Policy Studies on his release, writing about prison-reform issues, Kiriakou says the Bureau objected that "it would be inappropriate for inmate Kiriakou to write about prison reform issues", although he was by then at home rather than in custody, and his probation officer had already approved the arrangement. "I said, inmate Kiriakou never gave up his First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. And so I took the job and I dared them to do something about it, and they backed off."

His summary of the boundary: "Bureau of Prisons doesn't get to decide where I work and where I can't work." He raises it as the precedent he believes is challengeable on behalf of Reality Winner, whom he says has been pursued "even more than any of the other national security whistleblowers, to the point where they won't allow her to do interviews."

See also

- FCI Loretto
- Letter from Loretto
- Jeffrey Sterling
- John Kiriakou
