John Kiriakou says he had never personally encountered a pedophile before the day he went to prison, and came to see the condition as a form of mental illness affecting people across all socioeconomic strata rather than something unique to the powerful.[1] Before prison he had written to a former colleague from his time as an adjunct professor at a Virginia university — the dean of the university’s medical school, a psychiatrist — for advice on how to deal with the imprisoned child sex offenders he was suddenly surrounded by.[2] She told him there is no cure for pedophilia, only management through talk therapy and antidepressants, and warned him that convicted pedophiles like to talk about their crimes because doing so gives them sexual gratification from reliving what they did.[3] Kiriakou separately says he came to observe that 100% of the pedophiles he encountered in prison had themselves been molested as children, a pattern he found fascinating.[4]
Safe spaces, and the rule against discussing cases
In prison, Kiriakou worked in and eventually ran the chapel library. He says the chapel and its library were the only two safe spaces in the prison for pedophiles, who would otherwise be beaten in the yard, in their cells, or in the day room.[5] The chapel had a rule against inmates discussing the details of their own cases there, but Kiriakou says the pedophiles who used it as a refuge violated that rule constantly. One repeat offender, a 6’7” former firefighter the other inmates nicknamed “Chomo the Giant,” was expelled after Kiriakou told him to stop discussing his case and he responded, “Jesus loved the little children.”[6]
Individual cases
On his first day in prison, while assigned to wipe down tables, Kiriakou met a man serving 27 years who described being caught with crime-scene photographs of dead children that he had obtained from a friend working at a morgue — a story Kiriakou found horrifying and told the man never to speak to him again.[7] He also describes a repeat offender in his early-to-mid 60s from the mountains of North Carolina, nicknamed “Cook,” who served successive sentences — five years, then ten, then thirty — for repeatedly crossing state lines to molest children, offending again each time he was released.[8]