The commissary is the prison store, and in John Kiriakou’s account of FCI Loretto it is the hinge of the institution’s economy: the only lawful source of edible food, clothing and hygiene goods, stocked at prices set by a monopolist whose customers cannot leave.
The thirty per cent
The commissary carried an across-the-board thirty per cent mark-up, and that surcharge was supposed to be spent on the prisoners — athletic equipment, books for the library. Kiriakou filed a Freedom of Information Act request and established what it had actually been spent on: no athletic equipment and no library books, but workout equipment and a large-screen television for the guards’ lounge.[1] He calls that kind of petty corruption a way of life inside; the case that crossed the line into prosecutable theft, and cost a guard his job, was the officer who simply backed his pickup truck up to the commissary and loaded a thousand dollars’ worth of groceries into it.[2]
Buying your way out of the cafeteria
Because the cafeteria was largely inedible, the commissary was where prisoners actually ate from: bags of chicken and tuna, instant rice and spices, cooked in the cell block. Kiriakou describes the resulting food economy as the only thing you can do — and, in his own case, one he ate very well from, since the Italians he cooked with supplemented commissary staples with pork loin, chicken breast, white wine and fresh produce carried in by a crooked officer.[3] That dependence is also what makes poverty inside so sharp: money reaches a prisoner only through deposits into his commissary account.
The debit card at the gate
Kiriakou’s campaigning on the commissary extends past the prison walls. Money left in a prisoner’s account at release is not refunded and no cheque is cut; it is loaded onto a commercial debit card carrying fees so onerous that the balance is substantially consumed by the bank or returned to the Bureau of Prisons — a practice he groups with charging prisoners’ families punitive rates for a ten-minute telephone call, and one he credits Prison Legal News with exposing.[4]
The nimrod
The commissary also supplied the incident that first put Kiriakou at odds with the staff. He had watched a corrections officer ferociously berating a prisoner in the commissary and recounted it to his wife on the telephone, describing the officer as a nimrod. The call was monitored, and the remark came back to him — an early demonstration that nothing said on a prison phone is private.[5]