The Sociopath Next Door
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The Sociopath Next Door is a book John Kiriakou cites in two separate arguments: one about who rises to the top of the CIA, and one about who fills American prisons.

Why the agency looks the way it does

Kiriakou's starting point is a conversation with a CIA psychiatrist, a man he says is still a friend, who told him the agency actively seeks to hire people with sociopathic tendencies, but not sociopaths themselves, because a sociopath is impossible to control. Having no conscience and feeling no guilt, a sociopath blows straight through the polygraph examination, which makes it almost impossible to screen them out of the hiring process. His conclusion: "the CIA is full of sociopaths," with a good number of psychopaths as well, a judgement he offers with the caveat that he is not a psychologist, "but I'm not an idiot either."

The Sociopath Next Door supplies the mechanism. From psychological studies of American business leaders, Kiriakou says, the book establishes that sociopaths are comfortable climbing to the top on the backs of the people around them. So just as in a Fortune 500 corporation, the sociopaths and psychopaths at the CIA claw their way to the top, "and so they're the ones who come up with the idea of a secret prison system and a torture program and waterboarding and sleep deprivation and cold cells where people freeze to death," and the ones who implement them.

He has applied the same yardstick to a named individual. Discussing Mike Pompeo's admission that the CIA lied, cheated and stole, delivered, in Kiriakou's description, with a laugh and "in a sociopathic kind of way", he said that on his own limited reading of the book's criteria it would not shock him to find Pompeo meeting them.

Mental illness in prison

Kiriakou also cites the book for the figure that 85 percent of people incarcerated at any level of the carceral system, federal, state or local, have a diagnosable mental illness. He raises it in the context of prison as its own form of trauma, and of the bonds that shared trauma builds between inmates, drawing on his own incarceration. Told that the comparable figures among the homeless are close to the same, he agreed, and added that a great many homeless people commit crimes precisely in order to go to prison and spend the winter indoors, one of his cellmates had been living in a cardboard box under a bridge in Pittsburgh and went inside as soon as it turned cold.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Polygraph
- Mike Pompeo
