Passing time at Loretto is the practical problem John Kiriakou identifies as the real hardship of a sentence. In his account the worst part of prison is that it is Groundhog Day: every single day is just like every other day.[1]
For most of the men at FCI Loretto, he says, the answer was working out and watching television.[1]
The televisions
The television arrangement was factional. Kiriakou says the prison had eight sets, and that the Hispanic prisoners controlled four and the Black prisoners the other four.[1]
He describes the programming with an explicit caveat that he hates to stereotype but that this is simply how it was. The four Black-controlled sets showed MTV, VH1, BET and a sports channel. The Hispanic-controlled sets showed Telemundo, another Spanish-language channel he could not recall, ESPN Deportes — and, for reasons he attributes to some long-departed prisoner’s taste in soap operas, CBS.[2]
The white prisoners did not get to choose.[2]
Kiriakou says this did not much affect him, because he was not a big television watcher at the time: he did not watch Love and Hip Hop Atlanta, and he did not watch a Peru–Venezuela soccer match. So he read.[2][3]
The arrangement had consequences beyond boredom. Kiriakou notes that violence at Loretto was relatively rare, and that most of what there was broke out over what to watch on television.[4]
Working out
For many prisoners the answer was exercise every day. Kiriakou describes men who were nothing but rock-hard, knotted muscle, because there was nothing else to do but work out.[3] Among the Hispanic prisoners it was not even optional: an unwritten rule of the Pisces prison gang required every member to work out daily.[5]
Kiriakou’s own solution
Kiriakou says he was fortunate. Four hours into his first day a stranger’s postcard arrived, and he decided on the spot to answer every piece of mail he received — a decision that produced 7,000 letters to 675 people over 23 months and kept him very, very busy.[6][7]
He was also writing. Doing Time Like a Spy started as a joke — he did not intend it as a book, but thought he would write down some of the more ridiculous and absurd things that happened.[7]
He places reading in the same category, as a defence against depression in prison: a voracious reader anyway, he says he read well over a hundred books in 23 months.[8]