# The prison visiting room

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
>
> Cite as: "The prison visiting room," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/prison-visiting-room/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*The room where a federal prisoner sees his family, reached through a strip-search cell — where John Kiriakou's children came to accept where their father was, where a former CIA boss turned up unannounced, and which is closed entirely to prisoners held under special administrative measures.*

- **Setting:** [FCI Loretto](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/fci-loretto)
- **Entry:** Through a strip-search room
- **For SAMs prisoners:** No visit while any other prisoner is present

The **visiting room** is where a federal prisoner sees the outside world, and in [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)'s account of [FCI Loretto](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/fci-loretto) it is both the emotional centre of a sentence and a piece of machinery. Getting to it means going through a door that leads into a small strip-search room and activating a flashing light.[1]

## The children

Kiriakou describes telling his children where he was going and then watching them adjust in the room itself: they were sad, but they accepted it, and after three or four visits the visits became ordinary.[2]

## The visitor he did not expect

About a month into the sentence, one of his former CIA bosses appeared in the visiting room while his wife and children were there.[3]

## When the room is closed

The visiting room is also where Kiriakou marks the difference between ordinary imprisonment and the special administrative measures imposed on national-security prisoners. A SAMs prisoner cannot use the visiting room while any other prisoner is present, which means every visit has to be separately coordinated — one of a set of restrictions he cites when describing what awaited [Julian Assange](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/julian-assange) in the American system.[4]

## See also

- [FCI Loretto](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/fci-loretto)
- [Julian Assange](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/julian-assange)
- [Prison phone monitoring](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/prison-phone-monitoring)
- [The halfway house](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/halfway-house)

## Sources

1. S2E11 Unfinished Business (2026-07-27), at 30:58. Recording: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/6a62505222500f71202ce878/media.mp3 · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-07-27-dead-drop-s2e11-unfinished-business/
2. John Kiriakou Interview. Part 2 - FACING 40+ YEARS FOR ESPIONAGE. (2018-06-20), at 10:30. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBPY2lIgDjQ&t=630s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2018-06-20-rdap-dan-facing-40-years-espionage/
3. The Only CIA Officer Sent to Jail for the Torture Program (Ep 309) (2024-11-16), at 1:43:46. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrAf8gK44S4&t=6226s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-11-16-the-team-house/
4. Talks With Kiriakou About the Assange Extradition (2021-01-05), at 13:59. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmDLt0eVZJc&t=839s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2021-01-05-talks-with-kiriakou-about-the-assange-extradi/

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From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/prison-visiting-room/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt