Solitary confinement is the prison-isolation practice that John Kiriakou notes the United Nations has declared “a form of torture.”[1] He argues its use against depressed prisoners like Daniel Hale — locked down “quote unquote for his own safety” — is self-fulfilling: “he was not suicidal; now he is, because he’s in solitary confinement.”[2][1] Kiriakou draws on his own ten days in isolation, when guards took his glasses so he “couldn’t read anything.” His cell was “six feet by 16 feet”; he slept on “a steel bunk with no mattress, no pillow,” balling up a bath towel, and coped by “walking in circles all day long” to reach 10,000 steps.[3][4][5] He notes the same isolation held Julian Assange for years and calls jailing the suicidal in solitary “ridiculous.”[6][7]
Kiriakou cites the United Nations’ international standard that no one should be held in solitary confinement for more than 14 days; he says the U.S. has held some prisoners in complete isolation — no contact with another human being — for more than 40 years. Even the officially mandated “one hour of daily exercise,” he says, typically just moves the prisoner from a six-by-ten-foot cell into an attached outdoor cage of the same size, so the isolation never actually breaks.[8][9] He separately notes the European Court of Human Rights has twice refused to extradite prisoners sought by the United States, citing the U.S. prison system’s “weaponized use of solitary confinement.”[10]
Communications Management Units
Kiriakou describes Communications Management Units (CMUs) — specialized prison-within-a-prison units designed to control a prisoner’s contact with the outside world — as existing in exactly two places in the U.S. federal system: the penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana (a former federal death row), and the supermax prison at Marion, Illinois. He says the units were originally built for “the worst of the worst” — Gambino boss John Gotti died inside one, and the last surviving hijacker from the 1980s Abu Nidal Organization is housed in one — but are now also used, in his view, to silence people whose message is politically inconvenient, such as drone whistleblower Daniel Hale.[11][12] He describes CMU conditions as 23-hour daily lockdown in a windowless six-by-ten-foot concrete cell — which the United Nations has likewise declared a form of torture and cruel and unusual punishment — with incoming mail merely projected on a ceiling monitor for five minutes before being taken away, and only one phone call permitted per month, restricted to the prisoner’s attorney rather than spouse, children, or friends.[13][14]
An alternative model
Kiriakou contrasts this system with a self-sufficient minimum-security prison in Maine, where a warden taught inmates to farm a 50-to-100-acre parcel the prison already owned, making it self-sufficient in produce with enough surplus to sell in town.[15] He argues the results speak for themselves: U.S. prison recidivism runs around 50%, compared to 10–15% in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway — countries whose prisons, he says, are “set up like apartments” that teach life skills, even as the United Nations declares American prisons themselves a source of torture.[16]
As a threat rather than a punishment
Kiriakou describes solitary at FCI Loretto functioning primarily as a threat, and describes calling the bluff more than once. Told by a unit manager that he could be placed in solitary for calling staff “degenerate liars,” he answered that he was not afraid of it, invited them to do it, and told them it would be a lot worse for them than for him. The unit manager backed off.[17]
He identifies a specific staff code word signalling the threat. When an officer calls a prisoner “insolent,” it means the prisoner is going to solitary — a term he heard used against his friend Dave during a dispute over a locked door, which was defused only because Kiriakou stayed present as a witness.[18]
He also records the use of solitary as retaliation for speech in a case other than his own: a prisoner with untreated hepatitis C who was refused treatment and who complained angrily to his wife on a monitored telephone call was thrown into solitary for insolence the next morning and held there until his release date.[19]
Held to the same standard as the Assange finding
In 2021 Kiriakou used the UN special rapporteur’s conclusion about Julian Assange’s treatment as the yardstick for domestic practice, and found American prisons on the wrong side of it: “we all know that that the way the united states practices solitary confinement is a form of torture we know that these cmus these communications management units that we have in our in our medium and maximum security prisons is a form of of torture.”[20]
The extradition precedent
The argument has a specific legal purchase Kiriakou pointed to during the 2020 Assange extradition hearing. Asked what the single most important fact about the American prison system was for the defence to get into the record, he named the position of the UN special rapporteur on torture — that the US practice of solitary confinement meets the United Nations definition of torture — and then the consequence.[21]
“There are actually several precedents in British jurisprudence where the courts have refused to extradite prisoners to the United States because they would be subjected to solitary confinement.”[21] It is the reason he thought the length of the hearing favoured the defence: a long schedule meant room to put the American prison system itself on the record.[22]