Mr. Silverstein was said to have joined the Aryan Brotherhood, the white nationalist prison gang, while serving time at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. He was eventually placed in isolation there in a specially-designed suite where day and night never varied: A fluorescent ceiling light remained on continuously to facilitate ceaseless video surveillance. Meals were delivered through a slot in the cell door. Visitors were severely restricted, and outgoing phone calls were capped at two a month.

His isolation continued as he was transferred from prison to prison. At the Florence supermax, which he entered in 2005, he was confined 23 hours a day in an 80-square-foot cell, the minimum legal size of a New York City kitchenette. Exercise was limited to one hour a day in a private adjoining enclosure. His only immediate link to the outside was a black-and-white television in his cell.

Image Mr. Silverstein took up art while in prison, teaching himself and becoming accomplished at it. Credit... Thomas Silverstein

The “no human contact” punishment was imposed by Norman A. Carlson, the Bureau of Prisons director, in 1983 in response to Mr. Silverstein’s savage stabbing of the prison guard. With no federal death penalty in effect at the time for killing a correction officer, Mr. Carlson said this week in an email, “I don’t know what else could have been done to prevent further violence by a man who had nothing to lose.”

Mr. Silverstein was born Thomas Edward Conway on Feb. 4, 1952, in Long Beach, Calif. He told Mr. Earley that his mother, Virginia, who had been imprisoned for robbery as a teenager, was pregnant with him when she divorced her first husband and married Thomas Conway, whom Mr. Silverstein described as his natural father.

Four years later, she divorced Mr. Conway and married Sid Silverstein, who adopted him.

Tommy Silverstein, as he was now known, was often bullied in the working-class neighborhood where he grew up, in part because schoolmates mistakenly thought he was Jewish. Once, he remembered, his mother threw bricks through the front window of a local bully’s home after the boy’s father had incited another fight between his son and Tommy.

“That’s how my mom was,” Mr. Silverstein said. “She stood her mud. If someone came at you with a bat, you got your bat and you both went at it.”