The prison visiting room
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The visiting room is where a federal prisoner sees the outside world, and in John Kiriakou's account of FCI Loretto it is both the emotional centre of a sentence and a piece of machinery. Getting to it means going through a door that leads into a small strip-search room and activating a flashing light.

The children

Kiriakou describes telling his children where he was going and then watching them adjust in the room itself: they were sad, but they accepted it, and after three or four visits the visits became ordinary.

The visitor he did not expect

About a month into the sentence, one of his former CIA bosses appeared in the visiting room while his wife and children were there.

When the room is closed

The visiting room is also where Kiriakou marks the difference between ordinary imprisonment and the special administrative measures imposed on national-security prisoners. A SAMs prisoner cannot use the visiting room while any other prisoner is present, which means every visit has to be separately coordinated, one of a set of restrictions he cites when describing what awaited Julian Assange in the American system.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- Julian Assange
- Prison phone monitoring
- The halfway house
