Kiriakou’s published view of the correctional officers at FCI Loretto is unsparing, and he has said in terms that the average CO is a man who could not make it through the local police academy and could not make it in the military either.[1] The exception he keeps returning to is a single conversation.
The question
One CO pulled him aside one day. Kiriakou is precise about his own attitude to the man: he would not go so far as to say he liked him, but he did not dislike him, and he respected him. He was a nice kid, probably twenty or twenty-five years younger than Kiriakou.[2]
What the man whispered was: “hey, Kiriakou, how do I get into the CIA?”[2]
Kiriakou’s answer was encouraging and blunt. The man seemed nice and was obviously bright; what in the world was he doing there? He did not belong there. He should apply to the CIA — even, Kiriakou suggested, in the uniformed security division. He should at least give it a try.[2]
The answer
The CO thought about it for a minute and then said no, he could not do that. His mother and father had both been correctional officers. His grandfather had been a correctional officer. And his wife would never want to leave Loretto — a town, Kiriakou notes, of twelve hundred people in the mountains of central Pennsylvania.[3]
Why he tells it
Kiriakou called it the sad thing, because this man actually had something going for himself.[3] He then generalised from it: that attitude was very typical, and it was very parochial and very local.[3]
The story functions in his account as the human version of the structural complaint he makes elsewhere about who staffs federal prisons — that the work draws from a narrow local pool because the pool has nowhere else to go. The exchange he reports is the one occasion on which someone inside that pool said as much to him directly, and then declined the exit.