Asked whether prison had changed his perceptions of groups or types of people, Kiriakou said it had, very much so, and then widened the answer into an indictment of the system itself.[1]
Before
Before he got into trouble, he said, he did not give five seconds of thought to the justice system, or certainly to the prison system. Not five seconds of thought.[2] Living through it made him realise what a broken system it is.[2]
The list of failures
His complaint is not a single one but a sequence, each item stated as a problem in its own right. That the United States has a quarter of the world’s prisoners is a problem. That there is no rehabilitation and no education inside is a problem. That one in four black men in America is either in prison or jail or on probation or parole is a problem.[2][3]
Between those, and stated in the same form, is the one that has no obvious counterpart in the usual arguments about incarceration rates: “when mental health is treated as a disciplinary problem, that’s a problem.”[3]
His summary of the American response to all of this is that the country does not see it as a problem at all — and he pointed to an attorney general who wanted to reimpose mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes as evidence of the direction of travel.[3]
Where the population comes from
The second half of Kiriakou’s argument concerns the route in. You really get to see, he said, what happens in a community where everybody is poor, where people have no educational background or foundation in even basic education, and where they have no job skills. They end up in prison.[4]
That framing matters for how he treats the men he met inside. Kiriakou is unsparing about some categories of prisoner and has said flatly that some people are too dangerous to live among us. But the general population at a low-security federal prison, on his account, is not there because the system failed to deter them; it is there because a set of prior failures — schooling, work, treatment — had already run their course, and the prison is where they are counted.