Home confinement is the stage of a federal sentence served at the prisoner’s own address after release from custody. The statutory allowance is ninety days or ten percent of the sentence, whichever is less; Kiriakou received 87 days of it after FCI Loretto, and no halfway house time at all — which he understood as the punishment for having gone public throughout his sentence.[1][2] In another telling he puts it more bluntly still: because of the letters he wrote from Loretto he was given no time off at all, while everybody else was leaving early into six months of halfway house and home confinement, and he sat in the cell for every last day of the 23 months.[3]
The conditions
He describes it as worse than prison — “way worse” — and says he would rather have stayed inside.[4][5][6] Getting out, he warns, is far more stressful than anyone will tell you.[6]
The confinement is to the interior of the house. The front yard, the back yard and the stoop are all outside the permitted boundary, and stepping onto any of them is a violation that sends the prisoner back to prison.[4][6] Compliance is enforced by telephone, quite literally at any hour of the twenty-four, and the prisoner must give his name, his prisoner number and his social security number to prove he has not left.[5][7] You go stir crazy; there is nothing you can do.[6]
On top of that he was required to check in at the halfway house once a week and to submit to drug testing twice a week — a condition imposed on a man who has never taken a drug or smoked marijuana in his life, and which he was content to let waste as much of the government’s money as it wasted of his time.[5][8][7]
The stage can also be withheld as harassment. Kiriakou has described the Bureau of Prisons holding Jeffrey Sterling — an attorney and decorated fraud investigator with no need of the resettlement classes he was made to sit — at the halfway house rather than sending him directly home to home confinement, simply because they did not like him.[9][10]
Its place in the sentencing arithmetic
Home confinement is also one of the deductions that separates a headline sentence from time actually served, and Kiriakou uses it to read judges. Sitting beside the NSA whistleblower Tom Drake when Daniel Hale was given 45 months, the two turned and smiled at each other, because they both knew 45 months was not 45 months: less fifteen for good behaviour, less the three already served, less twelve for RDAP, less six for halfway house and home confinement leaves eighteen — which is precisely what the defence had asked for. Kiriakou reads Judge O’Grady’s number as a well-constructed way of giving Hale what he wanted without appearing weak.[11][12]
Afterwards
The transition back to ordinary life was, in his account, very difficult, and the harder problem was the one that followed it: nobody is willing to hire a convicted felon. A friend’s parents, both doctors, put him on their payroll to help get their practice running, an arrangement that lasted exactly as long as the home confinement did. From there he went briefly to the oldest think tank in Washington working on prison reform, concluded he would have to work for himself, and built a daily two-hour radio show, a weekly syndicated newspaper column carried in 220 small-town papers, a lecture circuit across the United States and Western Europe on what is wrong with the American prison system, then a succession of podcasts, his own television show and a ninth book.[8][13][14][2][15] None of these were issues he had been aware of before living them.[15]
Kiriakou returned to the comparison during the COVID lockdowns, which he identified directly with the experience: locked down, masked, nobody working, everything closed — “this is home confinement, this is prison, it’s a form of prison.” It is depressing and it weighs on you, he says, pointing to a threefold rise in prescriptions for anti-anxiety and antidepressant medication since the pandemic began, and prescribing the same remedy he used himself: get out, walk, aim for ten thousand steps a day.[16][17]