Rapper Lil Wayne Gets Solitary Confinement Over Tunes

Hip hop star will be in the box for the last month of gun sentence

Rapper Lil Wayne's beats got him in trouble behind bars.

The hip hop star, who serving a one-year sentence on New York's Rikers Island for gun possession, was caught with headphones and an iPod charger, and will have to finish his sentence in solitary confinement, officials said.

The Grammy Award-winning rapper was moved Monday into "punitive segregation" for a month, which would take him right up to his early release date in November, Correction Department spokesman Stephen Morello said. It's his punishment for stashing a charger and headphones for a digital music player in his cell earlier this year, officials said.

The rapper, whose real name is Dwayne Carter, will be confined to his new cell 23 hours a day, will not be permitted to watch TV, and will get just one phone call a week, Morello said.

Lil Wayne, 28, has been jailed since March. He pleaded guilty in October 2009 to attempted criminal possession of a weapon, admitting he had a loaded semiautomatic gun on his bus in 2007.

Officials said the headphones and charger were found in May, tucked in a potato chip bag in a garbage can in the rapper's cell.

The items are considered contraband, as inmates can listen to music only on radios and headphones sold at the jail commissary. Officers said the music player itself turned up in another inmate's nearby cell.

"Possession of contraband is serious," Morello said.

Selected Reading: The Associated Press, Rolling Stone, MTV.com.

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