The hierarchy of charges
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The hierarchy of charges is John Kiriakou's account of how prisoners at FCI Loretto ranked each other by what they had been convicted of, given on the DeProgram programme in July 2025 in answer to a viewer asking whether some crimes carried more standing than others.

The top

Asked which charge was most respected, Kiriakou answered in one word, twice: "RICO. RICO."

His explanation is that the statute functions as a proxy for something else. "RICO usually had murder attached to it. Usually it was conspiracy to commit murder, because a guy will murder somebody and then 20 people will get charged for it because they're all part of the conspiracy."

The respect, in other words, attached less to the racketeering statute than to the killing it implied, and to the organisational membership that produced the conspiracy count in the first place, a status separately recorded in the -47 suffix on a prisoner's number.

The bottom of the free-standing scale

Below the ranked offences sat a set that nobody bothered to rank. "The only guys where nobody gave a shit was like arson," Kiriakou says. "I knew three arsonists and people were like, 'Eh, arson.' Did you kill anybody? No. Okay, nobody cares." He puts insurance fraud and mortgage fraud in the same indifferent category.

One case in that bracket he had never encountered before: a man convicted of "property fraud", who "just forged papers transferring ownership of a golf course to himself and then he tried to charge people rent."

Contempt for the rich

The active dislike was reserved for a different group. "I'll tell you who they didn't like. They didn't like these big rich white-collar criminals," Kiriakou says.

Asked whether the objection was that such men were soft, he agreed, "yeah, soft", and gave the sentiment in the voice of the men who held it: "Oh, you thought you were going to get away with it. Poor you. You got caught and now it's like, 'Oh, I'm in prison. Oh my god.'"

Offered the summary that this was a class judgement, Kiriakou accepted it without qualification: "It's a class thing."

The ranking sits alongside the one he gives elsewhere in the same conversation for the sex offenders and informants at the bottom of the prison's social order, and the Italians at the top of it.

See also

- The forty-seven suffix
- The Italians at Loretto
- Chomo
- Prison racial segregation
- FCI Loretto
