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]
Why they are concentrated there
Kiriakou explains the demographic behind these accounts as a consequence of Bureau of Prisons placement rules rather than coincidence. Anyone convicted of a child sex offence is barred from a minimum-security work camp, and is also kept out of penitentiaries and medium-security prisons for their own safety — “they’ll be killed there. Everybody beats on pedophiles in prison.” That leaves the low-security level, which is where he served: “fully a third of the prison is pedophiles.”[5][6]
The inmate population imposes its own rules on top. Kiriakou lists them: no paedophiles in the television room, none in their own rooms during the day except to sleep, and no visitors in their rooms — the last because “they’re going to talk about pedophilia, which is what they do. They relive their crimes every single day.”[6]
He gives one enforcement episode in full. A paedophile who would not stop talking in his own room during the day angered an inmate serial killer known as Truck. Truck bought a $2.85 bottle of olive oil at the commissary, microwaved it to boiling in a bowl, and poured it over the man’s face while he slept: “the scream, I’ll never forget the scream. And his skin is just like dropping off of his skull.” The victim was helicoptered from the prison yard to Pittsburgh; Truck received ten more years on top of the forty he was already serving.[7][8] Kiriakou tells it not for its violence but as evidence for a general point about the federal system: “there are rules for everything and nobody pays any attention to them and nothing works the way it’s supposed to.”[8]
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.[9] 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.”[10]
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.[11] 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.[12]