Administrative remedy process
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One of the first lessons Kiriakou says he learned at FCI Loretto was that the officials running a prison can do virtually anything they want to the prisoners in their charge, and that the prisoners have effectively no recourse.

The administrative remedy process is the Bureau of Prisons system nominally providing that recourse, an internal route by which a prisoner can challenge a wrong, including the trampling of constitutional rights, and have it corrected. Kiriakou's assessment is that the process is as corrupt as the Bureau itself. The Bureau routinely ignores its own rules, he says, including the time limits placed on it for responses, and he never heard of anyone winning an appeal.

He describes the purpose as giving the Bureau a fig leaf, so that prisoner complaints can be thrown out on technicalities, usually that the prisoner did not file in time. The cynical objective, in his account, is that prisoners lose interest and give up, or that the process demands so much hoop-jumping and takes so long that the prisoner is released having served the sentence, with the appeal dying before it ever reaches a court. More cynically still, he characterises it as a paperwork exercise intended to show courts that the Bureau is addressing grievances.

Writing from Loretto, he made the same point about the internal complaint route and about the Inspector General: you write a complaint and are told to go away, and an inspector general could make an entire career investigating where the money from the inmate trust fund goes, asking where the new flat-screen television in the officers' medical lounge came from during federal budget sequestration. His conclusion was that the only remaining alternative was to go over the Bureau's head to its director, Charles Samuels, and he closed that letter from Loretto by asking readers to write to Samuels directly.

The first principle he draws from it is general: any monolithic bureaucracy will tend toward corruption without proper oversight.

The empirical case against the system is set out in a study Kiriakou cites from Prison Legal News, which found that the Bureau's failure to respond adequately to grievances is associated with higher levels of violence in federal prisons.

See also

- Bureau of Prisons
- FCI Loretto
- Prison Legal News
- Charles Samuels
- Letter from Loretto
