Kiriakou has said that he had a conversation once in prison that was so stunning to him he does not think he will ever forget it.[1]
The scene
It was the middle of the day. All the televisions were on, but most of the men were at work or outside, so the unit was essentially empty. Three African American men were sitting in the television room playing cards.[1]
One of them looked around and took stock of the arrangement out loud. They got three square meals a day. They got a warm bed. They got clothes. They got television. They could play cards. They got medical care. And then the conclusion, which is the part Kiriakou repeats: if they had women, the place would be paradise.[1][2]
What he takes it to mean
Kiriakou does not offer the remark as a comment on how soft federal prison is; he has been consistently scathing about that idea elsewhere. He offers it in the middle of an argument about deprivation outside the walls.
Immediately before recounting it he had been describing what he says prison showed him about poverty: what happens in a community where everybody is poor, where people have no educational background or foundation in even basic education, and where they have no job skills — they end up in prison.[3] The card game is the illustration attached to that claim. The men were not praising the institution. They were measuring it against what they had known, and finding that on food, shelter, clothing and access to a doctor it came out ahead.
That is the force of the anecdote in his telling: the comparison is only available to someone for whom those things were not already guaranteed. Kiriakou’s own experience at Loretto — the segregation of the television rooms, the pedophile population, the correctional officers he had no time for — supplied no such comparison, and he has never suggested otherwise.
The cellmate from Pittsburgh
Kiriakou has given the calculation a second time in the person of a man who acted on it every year. The last of his cellmates to move in was from Pittsburgh — “nice guy, perfectly normal, totally normal guy” — and when Kiriakou asked what he was in for, the answer was that he had a conviction from years earlier and had already served his time, but that “every year at the start of winter he intentionally violates his probation so that he can spend the winters in prison.”[4][5]
The alternative was a tent along the Ohio River, and “it’s cold in Pittsburgh.” Six months inside bought him the same three things: “I get three meals a day, I get a warm bed and I get free medical care.”[5]
The original conviction explains the length of the leash. He had been a carnie running carnival rides — “they’re all convicts” — and sold drugs from the carnival; because he crossed state lines it became a federal charge, and he served seven years followed by ten years of probation, which left him a decade of winters to spend as he chose.[6][7]