[2] Silverstein spent the last 36 years of his life in solitary confinement for killing corrections officer Merle Clutts at the Marion Penitentiary in Illinois.

Silverstein was timid, awkward, shy, and frequently bullied as a child in the middle-class neighborhood where the family lived, in part because his peers mistakenly believed he was Jewish.

Virginia Silverstein demanded that her son fight back, telling the boy that if he ever came home again crying because he had been beaten up by a bully, she would be waiting to give him another beating.

At age fourteen, Silverstein was sentenced to a California Youth Authority reformatory where, he said, his attitudes about violence were reinforced.

Four years later, he was paroled, but he was arrested soon after along with his father, Thomas Conway, and his cousin, Gerald Hoff, for three armed robberies.

In 1977, Silverstein was sentenced to fifteen years for armed robbery, to be served at United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.

In 1980, Silverstein was convicted of the murder of inmate Danny Atwell, who reportedly refused to serve as a mule for heroin being moved through the prison.

Thomas Silverstein spent his time in solitary confinement with a constant ceiling light, ensuring uninterrupted camera surveillance.

While Silverstein was on trial for Chappelle's murder, the Bureau of Prisons transferred Raymond Lee "Cadillac" Smith, the national leader of the D.C.

From the moment Smith arrived in the control unit, prison logs show that he began trying to kill Silverstein.

A few hours later, Clayton Fountain (also an Aryan Brotherhood member) used the same strategy to kill correction officer Robert Hoffmann.

Following the murder of Clutts, Silverstein was transferred to the United States Penitentiary, Atlanta, where he was placed in solitary confinement.

"[2] The events surrounding the murders of correction officers Clutts and Hoffmann inspired the design of the federal supermax prison, the United States Penitentiary, Florence: Administrative Maximum Facility (USP Florence ADMAX) in Colorado, which opened in 1994 and was built to house the most dangerous inmates in the federal prison system.

Bureau of Prisons officials were reportedly afraid that Silverstein would begin killing correctional officers held hostage by the Cubans.

[12] Silverstein claimed that the "no human contact" status is essentially a form of torture reserved for those who kill correctional officers.

"When an inmate kills a guard, he must be punished," a Bureau of Prisons official told author Pete Earley.