Asked what prison taught him that Langley could not, Kiriakou answers that it gave him access to a world he would otherwise never have seen — and that what he found there was a system built by accumulation.
The scale
His starting point is the standing joke that everyone in prison is innocent, which he declines to treat as a joke. “A lot of people in prison are innocent. We are the most overregulated, the most overcriminalized country in the world.” [1]
The supporting figures he gives are proportional: “We have 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prison population. We have the longest sentences for crimes compared to our European allies.” [1]
The mechanism
The number Kiriakou returns to is legislative, and he is careful about what it counts. “Every year for the last 20 years, Congress has created 50 new crimes, not 50 new laws, 50 new crimes every year.” He glosses it plainly: “That is something that was legal a year ago that is now a felony today.” [2]
He rejects the security justification outright. “That doesn’t make us safer. It makes us weaker. We’ve become a carceral country is what it is.” [2]
Why it happens
Kiriakou’s account of the cause is electoral rather than criminological. It happens “because of the nature of our political system where in order to win votes, you have to appear to be tough on crime.” [3]
The method of appearing tough is the ratchet itself: “you create new crimes and you increase penalties year after year after year.” He dates the pattern to the start of the modern law-and-order era — “we’ve been doing that since the Nixon administration.” [3]