At his sentencing in January, Kiriakou’s attorneys asked the judge to send him to the minimum-security work camp at Loretto, Pennsylvania.[1] He has described what that would have meant: minimum-security work camps have no bars on the windows, no concertina wire, and the doors are not locked. You are free to come and go as you please, on your honour not to abscond, and many of the men work in town — there is a university there, so a lot of them are janitors.[1]
His expectation, he said, was that it would be awful and depressing and that he would be without his family, but that at least he could be out and about and get on with his life.[1] He was sent to the prison across the street instead.
The conclusion he came to
Having served the sentence, Kiriakou’s view of the institution he had asked for reversed. He has said he came to the conclusion that the United States does not need minimum-security work camps at all.[2]
The reasoning is a straightforward matter of consistency. If your crime is so minor that the state is willing to put you in a place where you are free to come and go and free to work in town, then, he argues, the state should go the rest of the way: wear an ankle bracelet, stay at home, maintain a job, support your family and contribute to society.[2] The camp, on this account, adds the costs of incarceration without adding any of its supposed purposes.
The other half
Kiriakou has been careful to keep the argument from becoming a general one. In the same exchange, agreeing with a host who said that visits to San Quentin left him feeling that prisons are necessary, Kiriakou answered that this was right: there are some people who are just so dangerous that they cannot live among us as normal, contributing or productive members of society, and so “we really do need prisons.”[2][3]
The position that results is narrower than it first sounds. It is not an argument for emptying the federal system but an argument against its lowest tier — that the men held at the bottom of it have already been classified, by the government’s own security judgment, as people who do not need to be held at all.