Say five years is the advice John Kiriakou identifies as the first genuinely useful thing anyone told him in federal prison. He recounted it on the DeProgram programme in July 2025, in a stretch of the show given over to viewers’ questions about his sentence at FCI Loretto.[1]
The walk
The setting was Kiriakou’s daily exercise. Asked how prisoners became so heavily muscled, he answered that there was “literally nothing to do but work out”, and described his own regimen: “I made sure to walk five miles a day around the track, and when it snows they close the track and you’re only allowed to walk around the basketball court. So you walk around 500 times.”[2]
On the day in question the weather was doing exactly that. “It’s pouring down snow. It’s like 10 degrees and we’re walking around the outside basketball court,” he says. His companion was “a captain from the Bonanno family — so this is a very senior guy.” Kiriakou had been inside about two or three weeks.[1]
The question and the answer
The captain asked how much time he had. Kiriakou’s reply carried the complaint inside it: “I said 30 months, feels like 30 years.” The captain stopped him there — “Let me give you some advice” — and gave it plainly: “If somebody asks you how much time you have, you say five years.”[1][3]
Kiriakou asked why. The reasoning was about proportion, and about who else was listening: “There are guys in here with 20, 25, 30 years. If they hear that you have 30 months and you’re pissed off about it, they’re going to kick your ass. So tell them five years.”[3]
Why he ranks it first
Kiriakou calls it “the first really great advice anybody had given me in prison”, and the framing matters to how he tells the rest of his prison stories: the danger being managed is not the institution but the resentment of other men, and the remedy is a small, deliberate misrepresentation of his own position.[1]
It belongs to the same body of arrival-week instruction as the paperwork check, by which a new prisoner’s charge sheet is inspected to establish that he is neither an informant nor a sex offender — a process Kiriakou went through with the Aryan shot caller in the same period.[4]