The black box
=============

The black box is the restraint device John Kiriakou describes being fitted with for an outside medical appointment while serving his sentence at FCI Loretto.

The trip followed an injury to his left hand. Kiriakou reported a finger he was certain was broken; the physician assistant called it jammed, splinted it and refused an X-ray, prescribing ibuprofen. Ten days after the injury the X-ray was finally granted and showed that a tendon had snapped off at the centre knuckle, taking a chunk of bone with it. Eighteen days after the injury he heard the announcement he describes as dreaded, his name, and an order to report to the lieutenant's office.

The apparatus

Kiriakou was escorted first to the medical unit, where he was strip searched and issued brown trousers, a brown t-shirt, underwear, socks and slippers. An officer took his own clothes and watch and locked them in a bag in the unit.

He was then handcuffed and shackled around the ankles. A chain was placed around his waist, connecting to both the handcuffs and the leg irons. Over the handcuffs an officer locked a black steel box about the size of a computer hard drive, so that the lock could not be picked.

Kiriakou's comment on the treatment is sardonic: remember, he says, he is a dangerous criminal.

What it should have been

He contrasts the arrangement with what would have happened had he been sent to a camp, as both the judge and the prosecutor in his case had recommended. There, an inmate driver would simply have dropped him at the doctor's office and collected him afterwards. Instead, he says, a nameless, faceless bureaucrat at the Bureau of Prisons had decided he was a threat to public safety, the same decision that placed him in a low-security prison rather than a camp under the federal security levels.

The form

Fully shackled, Kiriakou was handed a form to sign: a list of rules for the trip to the doctor, including a promise not to escape and an acknowledgement that if he did attempt to escape he understood he would be shot.

One rule caught his eye. For the duration of the trip he was to call everybody sir.

He refused to sign. He would not try to escape, he said, but respect is earned, he was old enough to be the officer's father, and the officer called him by his surname. He said he would call the man CO, but he was not going to call him sir.

The officer replied that in that case he simply would not take him to the doctor. Kiriakou said fine, and the two men stared at each other.

Kiriakou published the account as one of the Letters from Loretto. He says the only response it drew inside the prison was a tongue-lashing he delivered to the physician assistant, telling him he seemed like a nice enough man but that he had known the finger was broken and had done nothing, when it was his job to treat him.

See also

- Medical care in federal prison
- Letter from Loretto
- FCI Loretto
- Federal prison security levels
- Correctional officers at FCI Loretto
