Depression in prison
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Depression in prison is, in John Kiriakou's account, universal: everybody is depressed in prison.

He reaches it as an extension of a CIA maxim. Rule six held that the human body can endure much more punishment than the brain says it can; adapting it for prison, Kiriakou dropped the word punishment and included not just the punch in the face but depression.

The scale of it

Kiriakou's measure of the condition is comparative rather than clinical. He describes overhearing a prisoner in the yard say that he had slept in the same bunk every night for the last ten years and would sleep in that bunk every night for the next ten, and thinking there but for the grace of God go I.

His conclusion was that he had no right to complain about his own lousy, measly 23 months. He assumes the man was serving a drug sentence and notes that the United States imposes draconian sentences for drug charges, describing twenty years in the same steel bunk on a mattress as thin as a bath towel. His summary of what prisoners do about it is bleak: we take it, we get depressed and we take it.

The regime

The programme Kiriakou sets against it has three parts: try to eat right, exercise every day, and try to distract yourself.

For him the distraction began with reading. Already a voracious reader, he says he read well over a hundred books in those 23 months.

The second part was correspondence. On his first day he decided to answer everybody who wrote to him, which produced 7,000 letters to 675 different people.

The third was writing a book. Kiriakou says he got it into his head that he might write one; it started off as a joke and became Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison, which won two literary awards. He wrote it in longhand on legal pads, one word at a time.

Against the alternative

Kiriakou contrasts his own solution with the standard one. At FCI Loretto the worst part of prison was that it was Groundhog Day, every day exactly like the last, and for most men the answer was working out and watching television, producing, he says, prisoners who were nothing but rock-hard knotted muscle because there was nothing else to do.

He also records that there is no support system to fall back on: in the same period he wrote that there is no such thing as treatment or rehabilitation in prison.

See also

- Rule six: the body endures more than the brain says
- Seven thousand letters
- Doing Time Like a Spy
- Passing time at Loretto
- FCI Loretto
