The halfway house
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The halfway house is the residential re-entry stage of a federal sentence. Federal prisoners are entitled by law to as much as twelve months of it; in John Kiriakou's description of how it works in practice, what that really means is about two weeks in the facility before the remainder converts to house arrest, six months of halfway house plus three of home confinement being a realistic expectation for a well-behaved prisoner.

Denied

Kiriakou received none of it. He is explicit about why: he was writing blogs from prison about problems in prison, the Letters from Loretto, and so he served every single day of his sentence with no relief at all. He nonetheless reported to one on release, and treats the entitlement as a right rather than a reward: a prisoner gets halfway house time regardless of what he does, because it is his right to it.

The job board

The central condition of halfway-house release is employment: forty hours a week, and not from home. Kiriakou describes the arithmetic that follows. The house he reported to held a hundred and ten men and had one job listed on its board, dishwasher at a Fuddruckers, and failure to find work risks return to prison. His own position was worse than most, since his résumé was, as an interviewer put it, unorthodox: a trained CIA officer, a member of the Abu Zubaydah capture team, and two years in federal prison. He advertised for work on Twitter, "must be 40 hours and not from home; I don't want the halfway house to send me back to prison just for unemployment." The fears were not borne out: the halfway house relented and allowed him to work for a medical technology company from home, and he shortly afterwards took a post as an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies covering torture, intelligence policy, the Middle East and prison reform.

Designed to fail

Coming home, Kiriakou says, was rougher than he expected; you cannot simply step back into your life. Probation restrictions, halfway-house restrictions and travel restrictions apply at once; a financial report is due every month; permission must be requested every time you leave the house and a telephone call made the minute you return. His conclusion is structural rather than personal: "it's no wonder so many people get violated and go back to prison, the system is set up to make you fail, it's not set up to help you succeed."

Alongside home confinement

The halfway-house obligation does not end when a prisoner is released to home confinement. Kiriakou's three months of house arrest ran concurrently with a weekly check-in at the halfway house and drug testing twice a week, the latter, he notes, imposed on a man who has never taken a drug in his life.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- Letter from Loretto
- Bureau of Prisons
- Private prison system
