“White supremacy welcomed his rage, and that made it irresistible.” In prison, white supremacist literature is required reading:
To survive the box, you learn to fish. People on the outside call it solitary confinement, but it isn’t really, not even at a place like Upstate Correctional Facility, the supermax prison in Malone, New York, ten minutes from the Canadian border. It’s true at Upstate you’re locked down twenty-four hours a day. It’s true you spend twenty-three of those hours in a small concrete and steel cage, and that the twenty-fourth hour is spent in another concrete and steel cage that’s connected to, but even smaller than, the first. It’s true that for the whole time you’re at Upstate, you might not touch another human being, and it’s true you won’t see another person except through a tight mesh of steel wire and reinforced glass. And it’s true you might be locked down for years.
But man is a social animal, and even in a place like Upstate, people will find a way to communicate.
— Joseph Margulies, lithub.com/in-prison…