On July 1, 2024, the US detained its most prominent political prisoner; its most obvious political prisoner probably since the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in World War 2.

On July 1 2024, podcaster, entrepreneur, former Navy officer, and political advisor to President Trump, Stephen K Bannon, "surrendered", in his words, to authorities, to begin serving four months' incarceration at Danbury Federal Prison.

FCI — Federal Correctional Institution - Danbury, in Danbury, Connecticut, is a serious prison. The handbook, which all inmates receive, reveals a range of minute restrictions on liberty, and even on any adult decision-making, that characterizes strict incarceration.

Stephen K. Bannon, now one of the loudest and most powerful dissident voices in America in our time, will have no access at all to the internet, according to FCI Danbury inmates' handbook.

Could that one condition alone, be the actual end-goal of this sentence, so assiduously sought? (As I have pointed out elsewhere, from my experience in the world of aides around President Clinton and VP Gore, everyone advising the President and VP relied on the protections of executive privilege, and they do so to this day. Mr Bannon is being treated with a shameful double standard).

The myriad restrictions on every aspect of an inmate's daily life, at FCI Danbury, reveal that while this is a "minimum security prison", there is at that facility an approach to incarceration that is mentally wearing and "institutionalizing".

Looking at these prison regulations, one can see from where the global mental torture of COVID-era "lockdowns" — the minute regulation of time, space, decisions, options — may have derived. ("Lockdown" itself is a prison-derived term).

Mr Bannon will receive a set number of "points" a month for visitors, and each visit uses up these points. He will need to submit to authorities, in advance, a list of visitors, and fill out forms for each; each visit will need to be approved. Points are used up for metrics as random-seeming as the distance the visitor travels.