<p>[Cruel</a> and usual: US solitary confinement - Features - Al Jazeera English](<a href=“Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera ”>Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera )</p>
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Timothy Muise, a prisoner at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Norfolk, protested to prison authorities about a sex-for-information racket being run by guards, in which certain prisoners were permitted to have sex in return for snitching on others.</p>
<p>He was thrown into solitary for two-and-a-half months, brought up on disciplinary charges for “engaging in or inciting a group demonstration”, and shipped out to another prison. It is far from unusual for prison whistleblowers to be silenced through the use of solitary confinement.</p>
<p>Maine prisoner Deane Brown, serving a lengthy sentence for burglary and robbery in the lockdown unit of Maine State Prison, began sending reports by letter then by phone to a community radio station; he called his reports “Live from the Hole”.</p>
<p>He was reprimanded by the warden who said he was “disclosing confidential information through the media”. Then Brown was suddenly whisked away to a series of maximum security prisons in Maryland, and ended up in a particularly brutal solitary confinement unit in New Jersey. Cases of jailhouse journalists being punished with isolation have surfaced in other states, as well.
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<p>There’s a syndrome I think. Children and teenagers who dream of doing justice aspire to be lawyers, and maybe police officers (unless they live in the big cities, where the corruption of the police forces turn them off). However, I don’t know of anyone who dreams about being a prison warden, except for power trippers who see some ad on TV about “majoring in Criminal Justice”.</p>