Not articles, just personal experience. I've never been to prison, but I've been messed with by police and prison guards. I had a friend who became a prison guard, and I've had a couple of friends who were in prison. It's not a massive population sample to base my judgments on, but the point I was making is that the rules, whether you agree with them or not, all go to shit when you let the people at the bottom choose to randomly not enforce then need on their judgments.

So whoever confiscated this reading lamp did what they were supposed to do, whether they had moral qualms about it or not. At first, this thread was full of people shitting on OP for being a jerk and taking this lamp. Turns out, he was just the nephew.

Next, you had people justifying taking the lamp, and giving various plausible reasons why it was the right thing to do.

All I'm saying is 1. Whether the decision to take this specific lamp was moral or not is less important than the guy who took it not having the authority to arbitrarily enforce our ignore the rules it is his job to enforce. And 2. He should not have this authority because he is not bright enough to make that decision, he has voluntarily chosen to spend the majority of his waking hours in a prison.