Sarge was the surname of a correctional officer at FCI Loretto, and the nickname she went by. John Kiriakou named her conduct — though describing her by that name rather than a first name — in one of the Letters from Loretto, and says it was one of two crimes the letter inadvertently exposed.[1][2]
Kiriakou’s description of her is unsparing. He wrote that the phrase rode hard and put away wet applied, and called her an ugly, mean, foul-mouthed, tattoo-covered has-been — a woman in her late forties or perhaps fifty who, he wrote, had been used and abused and discarded by so many men that she had come to hate the world.[1] He identifies her as the officer in his housing unit when he first arrived.[3]
The exchange
Kiriakou says she simply could not say his name, producing a string of mispronunciations. Walking down the hall one day with Dave Phillips, he heard her call out “hey, you”. When he turned and looked at her, she asked whether he was the man whose name she could not pronounce. Kiriakou gave her his name. She proposed a crude alternative instead. Phillips remarked “classy”; Kiriakou said “white trash” would be more accurate.[3]
She heard him. She then raided his cell, threw his belongings on the floor and walked over photographs of his children.[4]
The legal point
Kiriakou says he did not realise at the time that swearing at a prisoner in that way was actually a crime. It is not merely a violation of Bureau of Prisons regulations, he says, but a misdemeanour: a verbal reprimand for the first offence, two weeks without pay for the second, and dismissal for the third.[4]
He did not report her to the prison authorities. Instead he told everybody in the world what she had done, in the letter.[2]
The reaction inside
When the letter was published, the guards emailed it to one another. Kiriakou describes an officer he had until then simply ignored — and who had ignored him — coming up to him in the hall to ask whether the letter had been about her. Told that she had been perfectly lovely to him, she said “oh, thank God”, and then asked who it had been about. Kiriakou told her: it was Sarge.[5][1]
The second crime the letter exposed was heavier. Kiriakou describes two officers in the lieutenant’s office attempting to induce him to harm a Kurdish prisoner and then attempting to induce the Kurdish prisoner to harm him — conduct he characterises as conspiracy to incite violence in a federal facility, a felony carrying two to five years. He says it is impossible to prosecute in practice, because no United States attorney will take up a case against a federal prison guard unless the guard is smuggling contraband.[2][6]