When Thomas Silverstein first went into solitary confinement, President Ronald Reagan was talking Star Wars missile defense systems, Michael Jackson’s Thriller had hit, and Al Pacino was playing Tony Montana in Scarface. Widely considered the most violent prisoner in America, Silverstein has been in his cell 23 hours a day for the past 32 years. Since 1983.

He first cruised into California’s notorious San Quentin prison at 19 in 1971 on an armed robbery beef. The next time was 1977, for three armed robberies pulled off with his biological father and a cousin. At the tender age of 25, he was looking at a 15-year ride at Leavenworth for a heist that netted them not more than $11,000. (Sure, that money would have come in handy for the very drug problem that fueled his interest in felony.) If he was lucky, Silverstein would get out around age 40. He soon discovered that prison is about the exact opposite of luck.

Especially when he joined the Aryan Brotherhood — Silverstein was his stepfather’s name — and the murders started.

The first he may or may not have done. But while the charges were later dropped, they weren’t dropped soon enough to keep him from drawing his first life sentence and being transferred from the relatively “cushy” confines of Leavenworth and shipped off to the much heavier federal prison in Marion, Illinois. And when he showed up at Marion — a place, despite the name, not known for nuance — the racial agita of the outside world followed. When his first life sentence was overturned, Silverstein had actually killed someone.

The someone? A D.C. Blacks prison gang member. Whom Silverstein had strangled.

And because this is how prisons sometimes work, though Silverstein continued pleading innocence, a higher-ranking member of the D.C. Blacks had vowed to kill Silverstein and tried on several occasions as they had been placed in cells next to each other. He tried right up until Silverstein and another inmate killed him.

Even then, it probably wasn’t that Silverstein had killed him — after all, killings happen in prison all the time. But that Silverstein stabbed him 67 times? And then dragged the man’s bloodied and broken body all around the tier like Achilles dragging Hector? Yeah. Major institutional cause for alarm.

Enter Officer Merle E. Clutts. His fateful job was to snap that unit back into shape.

Humans, even bad ones, are social beings. Take that away and what do you have?
Sam McBride, a paroled convicted murderer who spent time in solitary confinement
Which is where the stories start to diverge. Silverstein, who had gotten into art as a way to soothe his savage beasts (much like his U.K. counterpart Charles Salvador), had started to imagine that Clutts’ attempts to snap the unit back into shape were personal, involving as they did destruction of some of Silverstein’s artwork. One day out of his cell and on his way to shower, Silverstein let Clutts walk ahead, up in front of him, and as they passed another cell another inmate handed Silverstein a shank and uncuffed him with a crudely constructed key.

Clutts never made it off the floor. “I just go all the way off,” Silverstein said in a recorded jailhouse interview with Pete Earley. “We’re fighting and stuff, but I just keep stabbing him. All I see are his hands moving and I’m stabbing … it was like a big weight was lifted off me.”

Except it wasn’t. In the immediate aftermath — including another, almost simultaneous, stabbing of a corrections officer by someone else in the Aryan Brotherhood — Silverstein was transferred to another prison. Standard operating procedure. But what wasn’t so standard was him being slapped in a “no human contact” cell. As in 23 hours a day inside, and then one hour in an enclosed exercise yard where only the sky was visible.

“It’s pretty fucking impossible to keep your sense of proportion in there,” says Sam McBride, a now-paroled convicted murderer who himself was in solitary confinement for five months. “Humans, even bad ones, are social beings. Take that away and what do you have?”

“Though I know that I want to live and have always been a survivor, I have often wished for death,” Silverstein said in an Amnesty International report. “I know, though, that I don’t want to die. What I want is a life in prison that I can fill with some meaning.” Complicated in the face of considering what that might mean in light of life at the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, or ADX, one of the so-called supermax prisons, where Silverstein is currently housed. Along with Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols, and Zacarias Moussaoui, a 9/11 conspirator.


Culled from OZY
http://www.ozy.com/provocateurs/thomas-silverstein-the-most-violent-prisoner-in-america/60234

Like this kind of Badoo as$...

A very troubled fellow

He should be the most violence in the world