The question about the showers
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The question about the showers is John Kiriakou's account of how he prepared for imprisonment, and of what he actually wanted to know. He gave it on the DeProgram programme in July 2025 when a viewer asked how bad prison showers really were, prefacing the question with "we've all seen the movies."

The lunch

Kiriakou's lawyers arranged a briefing. "One of the things that my attorneys did for me was they scheduled a lunch a couple of weeks before I left for prison with a former professor from George Washington University who played fast and loose with the National Science Foundation credit card and got two years."

He stresses how little he asked. The showers were "one of the very few questions I asked my attorneys", and it was "the very first question I asked him."

The answer

The professor dismissed the premise. "Oh no, don't worry about that," he said. "It's nothing like what you see on TV. You're going to go to a low or a minimum, and they're all individual showers, completely enclosed with shower curtains. Same with the toilets. They're all individual toilets with shower curtains. Don't worry about it at all."

Kiriakou's verdict on the briefing is unqualified: "he was exactly right."

The rule underneath it

He then generalises from the plumbing to the etiquette. "I never saw a guy naked in prison," he says, and immediately corrects himself for accuracy, "well, that's not true. We did have one strip search once."

The correction aside, the point stands as a rule with an enforcement mechanism: "you do not walk around exposing yourself unless you want to have every bone in your face broken." Kiriakou illustrated it in the same passage with the case of a prisoner who ignored the rule and was beaten senseless for it.

The episode belongs to a small class of Kiriakou stories in which the reality of the federal prison system turns out to be less lurid than its reputation, a corrective he applies as readily as the reverse.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- Federal prison security levels
- John Kiriakou
- Chomo
