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.[1]
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.[2][3] 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.[2]
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.[4] 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.”[5] 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.[6]
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.”[7][8]
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.[9][10]