Information that I have on my webpage about Thomas Silverstein, who has been in solitary confinement longer than any other American prisoner, was posted on the front page of the Internet website REDDIT yesterday, resulting in a quarter of a million visits to my page.
Yep, that isn’t a misprint. More than 250,000 readers clicked on the link to read about Silverstein and look at his drawings. The last time I checked, the story had netted 1,200 comments on the Reddit site.
Silverstein, a major character in my book, The Hot House, was put under what unofficially was described as “no human contact” after he murdered correctional officer Merle Clutts in 1983 at what then was the federal government’s most secure prison. When I met him in the basement bowels of Leavenworth penitentiary, the federal Bureau of Prisons kept the lights in his cell on 24 hours a day. It was just one of several ways the BOP punished Silverstein, who today is being held in the government’s Super Max prison in Florence, Colorado.
When I asked him how he slept with the lights on, he replied: “Pete, I close my eyes.”
I was the only and last reporter to inteview Silverstein face-to-face when I met with him several times between 1987 and 1989. We have kept up our correspondence. Amazingly, it is not unusual for me to get a handwritten letter more than a dozen pages long from Silverstein who sometimes apologizes for taking so long to respond because he is “busy.”
Somehow, after spending thirty years in solitary confinement, he still finds way to keep himself busy.
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