I have the same feeling in hearing of his suicide as I did when I heard of his crime...creepy.
I work with people that have spent long amounts of time in prison for a variety of offenses. I do work with people that have committed sex offenses like rape and other crimes like kidnapping and murder.
I've never come across someone that has done something crazy like he did but I'm not supposed to. Those people don't normally make it out of prison.
So when I heard the news last night the first thing that popped in to my head was...
That didn't take long.
I did the obvious check of the story to see whether he was in an altercation but I knew in my heart that he was not without doing the fact check.
Pardon my language but to inmates at what I assume are all prisons across the country Ariel Castro is a Chomo. It is "short" for Child molester but you can tell by the spelling that there is some homophobia going on there, otherwise it would be Chimo.
At any rate this means you are going to be abused by your fellow inmates for as long as any number of them see fit. Many of these men are not sex offenders 90% or more in most facilities. Many of these men have children and some of them have daughters. This turns your average known sex offender in to a target for abuse.
The kind of abuse they face is not unlike the abuse they give out, rape, beatings, isolation, more rape, and more beatings for an extended period of time.
Ariel Castro was a special case. The inmates in his facility know who he is, they know his crime, and they know he is coming to live with them. Strangely enough or not depending on how you look at people in prison, his presence among their ranks, is offensive. His living where they live, sharing their space, eating their food, to a lot of them makes him their equal. It is a fact that is not overlooked or taken lightly by the inmates and the staff at the prison.
Upon conviction, Ariel Castro was sentenced to life plus 1,000 years in prison. The part of the sentence that the judge didn't read or didn't have to was the part about him being sentenced to experience every bit of the abuse that his victims faced for the rest of his natural life. Any inmate with access to Castro was a potential abuser, there is no way he could have known who or when he would be attacked aside from the fact that they would be telling him and they would certainly do so.
Had he been held in the general population of the prison it is likely he would have been dead already and if not he would have eventually been killed by an inmate within the prison. Prisons are full of people who were victims of sexual abuse and if one of them is not getting out of prison for the rest of their lives, exacting revenge on a sex offender is simply not that big of a deal.
My assumption is that Ariel Castro was exposed to the inmates in the prison or he was somehow made to be painfully aware of what he was about to endure once released in to the general population and that was enough for him to take his own life. Obviously he was able to comprehend the level of abuse he could face as he had himself imprisoned and tortured three women for more than a decade, he now had time to think about how wrong that was and in his final cowardly but probably most honest act he has committed in a long time he took his own life. There are many people in the world who would have taken their own lives faced with decades of unrelenting and unpredictable abuse.
I am not happy to see him dead and I am not sad. I don't see it as a failure of the justice system that he killed himself instead of facing his sentence. I see it as the reality one faces when they have done the things that he has done.
Twenty years from now he would have been used to the rape and the beatings and they wouldn't bother him so much and because of that it wouldn't happen as often and he would eventually be just another inmate.
I have a saying for people like this who lose their lives. The last time I used it was when we dispatched of Osama Bin Laden.
"It is a lot easier to rest in peace if you live in it first." - Mim5677