Rule six: the body endures more than the brain says
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Rule six in John Kiriakou's numbered set of prison rules is that the human body can endure much more than the brain says it can.

He is explicit that this is an adaptation. At the CIA, he says, the rule ran that the human body can endure much more punishment than the brain says it can. He dropped the word for prison use.

The original meaning

At the agency the rule was about violence. Kiriakou says that once, twice, maybe more than twice over the course of a career, an officer will get into a fistfight and will get hurt, and that most officers worry unnecessarily about it. Being punched in the face hurts, but it hurts for a minute and then it stops. The worry about being punched, he says, is far more difficult than the actual punch.

He reports it from experience. Kiriakou says he has been punched in the face, during his time at the agency, and that with the chemical dump the body initiates when a fight starts, he did not even feel it, noticing later in the evening only that his cheek was slightly sore, and taking a Tylenol. He identifies the occasion as the day a man called his wife a whore and Kiriakou beat him into a coma. The man landed one punch, to the cheek. Kiriakou broke his hand on the man's face, which hurt considerably more, and says he still does not have full use of it.

He applied the same lesson to Dave Phillips after Phillips was knocked down in a dispute outside the prison library and complained about it all day. Kiriakou's question was whether his face still hurt; told that it did not really, he told him to stop worrying about it, because it was over.

The prison meaning

What Kiriakou added in prison was depression, a condition he says everybody inside has.

His illustration is an overheard remark in the yard. An African American prisoner walking a few feet ahead of him told his companion that he had been sleeping in the same bunk every night for the last ten years, and would be sleeping in that same bunk every night for the next ten.

Kiriakou's reaction was that he had no right to complain about his own lousy, measly 23 months. He notes he had no idea what the man had done, and assumes a drug charge, adding that the United States imposes draconian sentences for drug offences, twenty years in the same steel bunk on a mattress as thin as a bath towel. But we take it, he says: we get depressed and we take it.

The practical programme he sets against it is at depression in prison: eat right, exercise every day, and find a distraction.

See also

- Prison Depression
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Dave Phillips
- John's rules for prison survival
- FCI Loretto
