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Silverstein died on May 11, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He was 67 years old.
He had lived in isolation since the murder of a prison guard in 1983, a period of more than 35 years. Much of this period he was subjected to an unusual noncontact order in which he had little interaction with other people.
Silverstein reportedly served the longest sentence of solitary confinement in the federal penitentiary system.
He was first sent to prison in 1978 after being convicted of robbery. Accused at a Kansas facility, he was charged with killing an inmate and was transferred to a maximum security prison in Marion, Illinois. His first conviction for murder was overturned, but to Marion, he killed two inmates and stabbed a guardian deadly.
According to rumors, Silverstein would be part of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang and would have been targeted by other inmates, according to his former lawyer, Daniel Manville.
The authorities had considered him a danger and had transferred him to a federal prison in Atlanta, where he was confined in a cell of six feet by seven. The bright lights of the cell were not safe. They were never extinguished and he was constantly monitored by surveillance cameras.
Prior to joining Supermax Prison in Colorado, Silverstein also spent time in Leavenworth, Kansas.
In Supermax, Silverstein watched television, wrote letters, drew, crocheted, practiced yoga and meditated.
"It is almost more human to kill someone immediately than to intentionally bury a living man," he wrote in a 2008 letter to a friend.
In 2007, his lawyers, in a lawsuit against the prison office, declared that his conditions of detention amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
"The solitary confinement was widely used in the 19th century, but the punishment was later largely abandoned because of the opinion" that it was doing more harm than good, "said Craig Haney, Director of the Legal Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Correctional practice began to return to solitary confinement in the late 1970s and the 1980s as prisons began to overcrowded, Haney said.
About 80,000 people are being held in the United States in some sort of isolation cell, Haney said.
Pierre Meilhan from CNN contributed to this report.
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