Congratulations are in order for the people who run the Coleman II federal penitentiary in Sumterville, Fla., because they have done the impossible: make the mass murdering gangster Whitey Bulger seem like a sympathetic figure.

Now, it’s hard to have sympathy for Bulger at any level. He’s a murderer, not just of people, but of souls. The drugs he sold in Southie ruined more lives than the bullets he fired into skulls. He corrupted the FBI and everything else he touched.

But putting him in solitary confinement for 30 days because he touched himself is ridiculous, whatever you think of Bulger.

The story that Bulger was disciplined for masturbating in his prison cell made for some good, if predictable, jokes. But it was more significant for exposing — God, this subject is double entendre hell — how petty a prison regime can be.

First off, who knew it was against prison rules to masturbate? Call me naive but I figured that sort of thing would be tolerated, as long as it was done discreetly, in the interests of having a more docile inmate population.

Ron McAndrew, who spent a quarter-century in Florida at every level of corrections, from prison guard to prison warden, says it is tolerated, in general. He said it does make sense to have a rule against sexual activity in prison, and to include masturbation as a possible violation of that rule. But he said it’s an also an unwritten rule that both inmates and their guards use discretion.

“The only time I wrote up a guy for [this] was when a guy did it in front of a female officer and he refused to stop,’’ said McAndrew.

Indeed, just five years ago, female workers at the sprawling Coleman prison complex where Bulger is held filed suit because the prison leadership was not taking action against inmates who were doing just that.

But that’s not what happened in Bulger’s case. A correctional officer reported that at approximately 3 in the morning last June he was doing a prisoner count when he came to Bulger’s cell and found Bulger lying on his bed, touching himself. He ordered Bulger to stop, and apparently Bulger did.

I’ve heard some excuses over the years when people get caught in embarrassing or compromising situations, but Whitey’s self-pitying alibi was certainly novel: The CIA made him do it.

Bulger insisted he was merely applying medicinal powder to his genital area to treat a fungal infection. He said he was too embarrassed to seek treatment at the prison infirmary because there were female nurses there.

But the only reason he was in a position to be observed doing whatever he was doing is because his cell light was on. That, Bulger claimed, is because the CIA fed him LSD in the 1950s when he was doing time at the federal pen in Atlanta for a string of bank robberies. Bulger had volunteered for the study to shave some time off his sentence. He and other prisoners were told they were being used as human guinea pigs to find a cure for schizophrenia. But in reality it was a CIA experiment to develop mind control methods for the Cold War.

Since then, Bulger claims he has been plagued by nightmares and is forced to sleep with the lights on.

In his response to the formal charges, Bulger said that the prison guard who caught him set him up, yelling, “I got you.’’

“I’m 85 years old,’’ Bulger said in his defense. “My sex life is over.’’

Maybe it is; maybe it isn’t. But the prison’s solution to this transgression, throwing him into solitary, seems the opposite of what you’d want to do to discourage such behavior. Why would you take him out of a brightly lit cell on a wide-open block and throw him in the hole? That’s like locking a habitual drunk driver all alone in a bar.

McAndrew, who now works as a consultant for prisons and regularly testifies as an expert witness, is generally very supportive of correctional officers, having been one himself. He says they have a hard, largely thankless job. But he thinks the Bulger case was a gross overreaction.

“This is an officer who has a low level of personal and professional maturity, or he was trying to make some news,’’ said McAndrew. “ If I wrote up every inmate I caught masturbating, half the prison would be locked up in solitary. This is ridiculous.’’

I’m with McAndrew.

Still, Bulger’s wounded tone was a bit much.

“I’ve never had any charges like that in my whole life,’’ he wrote in his response to the complaint.

This from a guy who strangled women, who took naps after he put bullets in people’s heads, who left people in shallow graves, who drowned his neighborhood in drugs and blood.

And if any of the easily offended people at that prison in Florida think they’re doing us any favors by humiliating Whitey and hastening his demise by throwing him in solitary, consider this: If Whitey dies before the appeals court decides on his appeal of his conviction and life sentence, his conviction will be vacated.

We’re all laughing at Whitey, but let’s not give him the last laugh.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.