The guard booth rounds
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Asked to explain the failures around Jeffrey Epstein's death in custody, John Kiriakou declined to treat them as remarkable. Having done prison time himself, he said, he could report that most prison guards "have their heads up their asses."

What the officers do

His description of the working shift is concrete. Officers are asleep on the job, or in the guard booth looking at pornography, or playing solitaire, or talking to their girlfriends.

The consequence he draws is procedural. Guards are supposed to walk the unit every eight minutes or every fifteen minutes, depending on the security level of the institution. In his account they do it once every hour or once every two hours, "because they're sound asleep in that guard booth."

The hiring standard

Kiriakou attributes the pattern to who the Bureau of Prisons is able to hire. These are, in his phrase, "washouts from the local police academy or from the military who couldn't cut it anywhere else."

The entry requirement, as he states it, is minimal: "literally the only qualifications you need to be a prison guard [are] you have to be working on a GED or already have a GED or high school diploma and no felony convictions. That's it." He repeats the last two words for emphasis. "And so you're not getting the cream of the crop, the best that society has to offer."

The cameras

The same explanation covers the recording equipment. Reports that the cameras were not working at the relevant time did not surprise him: "the cameras never work anywhere in all the prisons, the cameras are down half the time."

His reasoning is that nobody has an incentive to fix it, no one cares to make sure the cameras are working, or upgraded, or hooked up properly, or that they are the latest available. "You get what you pay for," he said.

Why he raises it

The passage is offered not as a general indictment of the Bureau of Prisons but as the evidentiary basis for a specific conclusion about how Epstein died. Kiriakou's point is that the failures widely treated as suspicious are, in his experience of federal custody, ordinary.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Bureau of Prisons
- FCI Loretto
- Jeffrey Epstein
