Castro"s prison "hell" to be mostly solitary

Angelo Merendino / Getty Images

Ariel Castro at his sentencing on Thursday.

By Erin McClam, Staff Writer, NBC News

If Ariel Castro’s hell is just beginning, as one of his victims told him, it’s going to be an especially lonely kind of damnation.

The Cleveland kidnapper will be isolated behind bars for his own safety — most likely, Ohio criminal justice experts say, in a bleak, remote prison where his only contact will be guards and the inmates who bring his meals.

---

“He really doesn’t understand the gravity and horror of the offenses he committed,” said Lewis Katz, a professor of criminal justice at Case Western Reserve University. “But he’ll have plenty of time to think about it.”

Castro, who admitted kidnapping three young women for a decade and raping them inside his horror house, was ordered Thursday to serve life without parole, plus 1,000 years.

He insisted that he was sick, not a monster, and addicted to masturbation and pornography. One of the women, Michelle Knight, told him at a dramatic sentencing hearing: “I spent 11 years in hell. Now your hell is just beginning.”

The only decision made so far about Castro’s future home is that he will be isolated from the general prison population, said JoEllen Smith, a spokeswoman for the Ohio prison system. That determination was made in part for his own protection.

“Sex offenders and people who hurt women are at high risk of being killed within prison, especially in Ohio,” said Alana Van Gundy, who teaches courses on criminal behavior at Miami University of Ohio.

Castro pleaded guilty to aggravated murder for abuse that terminated the pregnancy of one of his captives, and the hierarchy of inmate-on-inmate violence places those who harm children “at the very top of the list,” she said. 

In particular, she said, Ohio prisoners are more dangerous than they would be otherwise because of a higher rate of mental illness among inmates. The state has cut mental health services in recent years, and prisons have absorbed more of the mentally ill, she said.

Castro’s first stop on the way to his life sentence will be the Lorain Correctional Institution in the village of Grafton, a sort of clearinghouse for Ohio inmates. There he will be strip-searched, photographed, fingerprinted and checked for gang markings.

He will be allowed to keep his watch, provided it displays only the time and date, and a Bible if he wants one, but not much else. He’ll be given a medical checkup and a mental health evaluation before state authorities figure out where to send him.

Katz said Castro’s most likely future home is the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, a maximum-security lockup outside the town of Lucasville, which is about an hour and a half away from Cincinnati and near not much of anything else.

For the first time, Michelle Knight confronted the man who held her captive for 11 years, telling Ariel Castro she spent more than a decade in hell, and now “your hell is just beginning.” Castro was sentenced to life in prison without parole, plus 1,000 years. NBC’s Kate Snow reports.

The prison, drab and forbidding, has about 1,300 inmates. It was the site of what was described as the longest prison siege in American history — a 1993 uprising that lasted 11 days and resulted in the deaths of one prison officer and nine prisoners.

On the bright side, it has a 1½-acre garden planted and cultivated by inmates. The crops — sweet potatoes, zucchini, radishes, watermelon and beets, among others — are donated to a nearby homeless shelter.

But it’s unlikely that Castro will develop a green thumb. He will probably spend as long as 23 hours a day in a cramped cell with little more than a desk, toilet and bed, and the hour outside will be in an enclosed space, perhaps also by himself, Katz said.

“It’s exactly what you see on TV and in the movies — unpleasant,” Katz said. “It’s going to be as unpleasant as any penitentiary in the United States.”

He may get a modest television, and access to a limited prison library, the professor added.

Castro asked a judge at a previous hearing for permission to see the 6-year-old daughter he fathered with one of the captives, Amanda Berry. Instead, he was ordered to stay away from her.

As for other visits, they’ll be tightly restricted — perhaps an hour a week if Castro is lucky, Katz said. And it’s just as well: His family has suggested they have little interest in visiting him in prison.

“I think that if he really can’t control his impulses and he really doesn’t have any value for human life, the way this case has shown, then behind bars is where he belongs for the rest of his life,” his son Anthony told TODAY earlier this week. “I have nothing to say to him.”

Related:

• Castro’s blame-the-victim act all too familiar, abuse experts say


• Ariel Castro victim Michelle Knight: ‘Your hell is just beginning’

This story was originally published on Thu Aug 1, 2013 11:18 PM EDT

Castro"s prison "hell" to be mostly solitary

Castro"s victims resilient after years of abuse

• Ariel Castro wanted his victims to think they could not get away


• They kept believing that they would; they held together and persevered


• For what they’ve been through, many are surprised how resilient they’ve been


• Resilience is something most people can develop, psychologists say

(CNN) — They were living in hell, and Ariel Castro did all he could to make sure they’d never escape it.

He tied and chained them up, removed handles from doors and replaced them with padlocks. He rigged entrances to the house with makeshift alarms, threatened them with a gun and feed them only once a day.

He covered windows to keep them out of view and sunlight out of their rooms.

But Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus focused on the light at the end of the long, dark tunnel.

They nurtured the faith that they would one day be free. They clung to each other. They persevered and emerged from years of hell to find new life.

In their rare public appearances since, people have expressed surprise over how intact and at times cheerful they appear after all they have been through.

Frank Ochberg, a pioneer in trauma research who testified in the case Thursday, lauded the three women’s survival and coping skills as “marvelous, compelling examples of resilience.”

Ochberg testified when Castro was sentenced to multiple lifetimes behind bars.

Resilience. It’s that state of mind that allows people to survive natural disasters, wars, the loss of whole families, even torture, and keep on living and eventually, hopefully, thriving.

“It means bouncing back,” says the American Psychological Association.

Knight’s ordeal

On Thursday, Knight took a brave step in that direction.

She endured Castro’s torment the longest. It has been said that, of the three women, she has had the roughest recovery so far. The accounts of the abuse Castro doled out to her were some of the most shocking.

When he made her pregnant, he pounded her belly, the girls have said, until she miscarried. He has steadily denied the accusation.

She bravely walked into a Cleveland, Ohio, courtroom Thursday to face her tormenter, cast off the shackles of 11 years of his torture and sexual abuse, and wish him a life in hell.

Castro kidnapped her in 2002, when she was 21. He tore her away from her little boy, who was age 2 at the time, for what felt like forever.

“Days never got shorter. Days turned into nights. Nights turned into days. Years turned into eternity,” she sobbed.

As she read her prepared solemn sendoff to Castro, tears drenched her face, filling one handkerchief after the next.

But she kept on. She let him know that while he descended into the depths of life in prison, she would emerge from this.

“I spent 11 years in hell, and now your hell is just beginning. I will overcome all of this that happened. From this moment on, I will not let you define me or effect who I am.”

Taking hold of the situation and defining it for oneself is an important part of resilience, psychologist Rebecca Bailey told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Thursday.

Knight and the others are developing “an understanding that you can move forward past these events,” she said. They need to, so they can let go.

Resilience is “ordinary”

The strength in the face of their suffering may make Berry, DeJesus and Knight seem exceptional. But most of us are capable of the same spirit, the APA says.

“Research has shown that resilience is ordinary, not extraordinary.” It points as an example to the large number of Americans who lost loved ones in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and how they rebuilt their lives.

“Resilience is not a trait that people either have or do not have,” the APA says. “It involves behaviors, thoughts and actions that can be learned and developed in anyone.”

Some of what Knight said Thursday indicates that the three did that together.

Caring relationships

The most important part of resilience is to develop caring relationships, the APA says.

In court Thursday, Knight credited DeJesus — whom she shared a dark room measuring about 7 feet by 11½ feet — for saving her life.

“I never let her fall, and she never let me fall,” Knight said. “She nursed me back to health when I was dying from his abuse. My friendship with Gina is the only good thing to come from this situation.”

She returned the favor, at a cost to herself.

She placed herself in between Castro and DeJesus, taking on physical and sexual abuse herself to protect her friend, Ochberg testified.

Being the oldest, she often served as doctor, nurse and pediatrician for Berry and her young child.

Look to the future

It is important to see a horrible situation as something you will get out of, the APA says.

Somehow, Knight, Berry and DeJesus kept hope. As Knight said, “We said we’ll all get out alive some day and we did.”

She has said that she wants to make a life helping others who have been in her situation. She wants them to “know that there is someone out there to lean on and to talk to.”

“I’m looking forward to my brand new life,” she said in a statement.

Keep processing

The pain does simply disappear, the APA says. It recommends writing about the feelings and thoughts attached to the trauma. The girls kept diaries on their torments.

It also recommends spiritual practice. Knight has turned to her belief in God to find comfort.

“Emotional pain and sadness are common in people who have suffered major adversity or trauma in their lives. In fact, the road to resilience is likely to involve considerable emotional distress,” it advises.

“They have life sentences,” said Ochberg of the girls’ emotional state.

“I think they will — with the love and support of the whole community — they have a good chance to live a good life. But that doesn’t mean that they’ll ever be free of the damage that was done,” he said.

While they’re no longer locked up in the hell Castro build for them, it is still inside of them, and they may need to let some of it out.

CNN.com Recently Published/Updated

Castro"s victims resilient after years of abuse

Ariel Castro"s home an oasis of calm on chaotic block, police records show

Emmanuel Dunand / AFP – Getty Images file

Police patrol cars are parked in front of the Seymour Avenue home of Ariel Castro on May 8 in Cleveland. Police were on this block more than a thousand times during the 10 years when women were missing.

By Bill Dedman and Matthew DeLuca
Staff Writers, NBC News

During the more than a decade that Ariel Castro allegedly held kidnapped teenagers and young women captive in his home at 2207 Seymour Ave., police officers were within shouting distance of the house more than a thousand times, according to Cleveland Police Department records analyzed by NBC News.

Follow Open Channel from NBC News on Twitter and Facebook.

From the time the first kidnap victim vanished in August 2002 until the three women and a 6-year-old girl emerged from the Castro house on May 6, 2013, police responded to calls on that block 1,099 times — or about once every three and a half days. Castro pleaded not guilty last week to 329 charges, including kidnapping and rape.

The records — police dispatch logs and a few follow-up reports – offer a clue to a central mystery of the case: How could the women have gone undiscovered for so long? Castro’s whitewashed home – despite its plywood-covered windows and padlocked front door — was one of the quietest on a chaotic block, one of the houses making the fewest reports to police.

Next door to the Castro house, at No. 2003 Seymour, residents called police 35 times. Two more doors down, at No. 2115, police fielded 37 calls. Across the street and a few doors down at No. 2120, police came 68 times.

---

The neighborhood emerges from the police records as a central character in the crime story, a declining neighborhood in social turmoil. Why would the quiet house on the block draw a second glance from officers who are responding to domestic abuse calls and flashers, to broken windows and prowlers, to a fight involving 20 people armed with baseball bats?

Google Maps / NBC News

Map shows street addresses on the block of Seymour Avenue where Ariel Castro lived

Khalid Samad, a community organizer in Cleveland who had worked with police and organized community searches for the missing women, described an incident that occurred the evening that Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and Berry’s 6-year-old daughter were freed. He said it painted a picture of the current state of the neighborhood.

“Not an hour after they’re out, I’m standing on the street near the Castro house and a fight broke out a few doors down because a guy who was out there saw a guy who he recognized as having shot him on the street,” Samad said. “Dude took off running, and they’re wrestling down in front of the church. That’s the kind of thing that would go on there.”

The stretch of Seymour Avenue extending from Scranton Road to West 25th Street has seven houses on the south side of the street, surrounding the whitewashed Castro house at 2207, and nine houses and two apartment buildings on the north side.

It’s a tough neighborhood struggling with unemployment and poverty, with a few well-tended houses and just as many vacant lots. Several houses, including an apartment building down the block from Castro’s residence, are vacant and boarded up. While some residents described the neighborhood as close-knit, others said it has suffered from increasing drug use and violent crime.

Ariel Castro was arraigned on rape, aggravated murder and kidnapping charges at a June 12 hearing where he pleaded not guilty. NBC’s Lester Holt reports.

Given the frequency with which police visited the block over the period, it’s not surprising that they were often present near milestones in the kidnapping cases.

Three days after 20-year-old Knight disappeared on Aug. 22, 2002, police were two houses away from the Castro house, responding to a call at 2221 Seymour about the theft of a cell phone. (The residents at these addresses were typically calling police to report illegal or suspicious activity — not perpetrators but victims or witnesses.)

Nine days after 16-year-old Amanda Berry disappeared on April 21, 2003, police were at 2221 Seymour again, investigating a car with no plates that had been left on the street for months.

And the day after 14-year-old Georgina “Gina” DeJesus disappeared on April 2, 2004, police were at 2022 Seymour, investigating harassing telephone calls.

Some incidents would have placed officers right outside Castro’s front door. On April 6, 2007, for example, two cars collided almost directly in front of the home, which is set back from the street. Police were on scene for 78 minutes.

On the Fourth of July weekend in 2006, a street fight near 2115 Seymour involving 20 people with baseball bats sent a pregnant woman to the hospital and drew several police cars.

Officers came to the Castro house only twice during the 3,910 nights that Knight was missing, as police have said, and neither call had anything to do with the missing women.

David Duprey / AP file

Law enforcement officials gather evidence at the Cleveland home of Ariel Castro on May 9.

The first visit was on Jan. 26, 2004, as police investigated a complaint that Castro had left a child on the public school bus that he drove. The boy said Castro kept him on the bus while Castro went to a Wendy’s restaurant for lunch. He was not charged. According to his school personnel file, Castro was fired in 2012 after a traffic violation and then leaving his bus unattended in a school fire lane while he went home to rest.

The second visit came on July 3, 2009, when Castro called police to complain about a fight in the street.

A third entry for the Castro address was marked in the records as a “test” on July 3, 2009; a police department spokeswoman said that would not have been a call from the address, and the records show no officer was dispatched.

The Cleveland police spokeswoman said officials would have no comment about the records, which were provided in response to a public records request by NBC News.

There is no indication in the records that police officers were inattentive or missed clues that could have led to the discovery of the women. Some of the calls they responded to were reports of unidentified women screaming, but there is no suggestion that the screams emanated from Castro’s home.

On Jan. 20, 2003, a visually-impaired woman at 2115 Seymour, three doors down the street from the Castro house, called to say she could hear a female “screaming out front.” An officer arrived within five minutes, and was on the scene for 45 minutes. There’s no indication in the records of what was found.

The same woman heard, on May 6, 2008, a female voice at the apartment building across the street from her house, yelling, “Get off me!” And, the report says, the caller said the voice sounded covered or muffled. She also said she heard a baby crying. Again, no report was filed, and the dispatch log doesn’t indicate police found anything. The call was cleared 19 minutes after the officer arrived.

Nor is there any support in the records for statements by a few neighbors who said — after the women were rescued — that they had alerted police to strange goings-on at the Castro house. They included some accounts suggesting that witnesses had reported seeing women chained and naked in the back yard.

Police officials have said that those calls were never made, and the women themselves told investigators  they were only allowed outside twice, and then forced to wear wigs and sunglasses and keep their heads down.

“There is no evidence to indicate that any of them were ever outside in the yard, in chains, without clothing, or any other manner,” Martin Flask, Cleveland director of public safety, told reporters on May 8.

Police Chief Michael McGrath told NBC News the same day, “We have no record of anyone calling” to report anything suspicious about the Castro house.

While police came under criticism from both residents and armchair detectives after Castro’s arrest, department officials have consistently defended their investigation of the disappearances as thorough and focused.

“I can tell you personally that I busted my butt to find those girls,” Keith Sulzer, Cleveland police district commander, said at a community meeting on May 9. “Me and my guys searched every vacant lot, every vacant building, everywhere that we could legally go in and search.”

Perhaps as telling as what is in the records is what isn’t: calls about the Castro house. That absence supports police accounts of the isolation in which the women were kept and their terrorized mental states after years of captivity.

After their release, the three women told police that they were chained in the basement for a time, then were allowed more freedom to spend time on the second floor of the Castro house, still behind locked doors and subject to beatings, according to a Cleveland police report. The women also said that Castro intimidated them by pretending to leave but would punish them if they tried to escape or call out for help.

Even so, Samad, the community organizer, said he believed the women might not have gone unnoticed in a different neighborhood.

“If this was an inner-ring suburban neighborhood,” he said, “you’d have some nosy neighbors who would ask, ‘Why are your windows boarded up, why are you taking groceries in if you don’t have family there?’”

Contact reporters Bill Dedman at bill.dedman@msnbc.com, and Matthew DeLuca at Matthew.DeLuca@nbcuni.com.

More from Open Channel:

• US intel officials: ‘Dozens’ of terror plots disrupted by NSA surveillance


• Victim of alleged rape at Marine base: ‘I thought … I would be safe’


• Secret court won’t object to release of opinion on illegal surveillance

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook 

Investigate this!

Read and vote on readers’ story tips and suggested topics for investigation or submit your own.

Open Channel

Ariel Castro"s home an oasis of calm on chaotic block, police records show