Kiriakou worked in the chapel at FCI Loretto after a first job in the prison library. Both places, he has explained, functioned as refuges — and not for the reason a visitor might assume.
Why they filled up
As a rule of thumb, he said, the library and the chapel are real safe zones for child molesters in prison, because there are always correctional officers there. The men knew they were not going to be beaten up in either place. In consequence they spent their days there, literally all day, from morning until night.[1]
The protection was necessary. Kiriakou has described a regime of enforced separation at Loretto in which child molesters were not allowed visitors in their cells, were not allowed seats in the television room, and had to sit at designated tables in the cafeteria.[2] The chapel and the library were where that regime did not reach.
The rule
The staff response was a house rule: in the chapel, you could not talk about your case. Kiriakou’s justification was straightforward — the chapel is a place of meditation and reflection and prayer, and, as he put it, nobody wants to hear about your sick case.[1][3]
The rule was, by his account, almost universally ignored. Talking about their cases was all the men would do.[3]
Enforcing it
His illustration is a fireman from Hagerstown, Maryland — a man of six foot seven or six foot eight whom the prison called Chomo the Giant — who was holding forth at length about his own offences against his fifteen-year-old daughter. Kiriakou went out and told him there was no talking about your case. The man looked at him indignantly and answered: “Jesus loved the little children.”[3][4]
Kiriakou said he was so flabbergasted that he simply went back into the office and sat down again, on the view that you cannot reason with these people.[4] The exchange is the closest thing in his account to a statement of why the rule existed and why it could not be made to work.