Aaron Schaffhausen already knows most of his fate.
Monday afternoon, he is scheduled to be formally sentenced to serve three mandatory life prison terms for the brutal murders of his three young daughters.
How and where he’ll spend his next decades behind bars — as well as whether he’ll ever be eligible for release — is still in question.
Schaffhausen and the corrections administrators responsible for him will have to navigate a pecking order of inmates who may not look kindly upon him for his crime, experts say.
“There’s a hierarchy among prisoners,” said Martin Horn, a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who once led corrections for the state of Pennsylvania and city of New York. “Inmates who are bank robbers are very high-status prisoners because they’re viewed as very bold. But inmates who prey on children are viewed as weak.”
Schaffhausen, 35, admitted to killing his three daughters, 11-year-old Amara, 8-year-old Sophie and 5-year-old Cecilia, in the River Falls, Wis., home the girls shared with their mother last July. Prosecutors say he cut the girls’ throats to hurt his ex-wife. Defense attorneys argued at his April trial that Schaffhausen was insane, but a jury didn’t agree. So instead of going to a mental institution, Schaffhausen will serve mandatory life sentences in prison.
Criminologists and former prison administrators say the corrections system will take pains to determine what kind of prison setting he will fit into best.
“The prisons might be more vigilant with a high-profile case like this,” said Joshua Page, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, who has studied prison dynamics. “Which might mean he does most of his sentence basically in isolation until people forget about it.”
Fortunately, he will be serving his time in prison where there is a history of infamous killers being murdered in prison, with Jeffery Dahmer being the most infamous.
So, good luck to Schaffhausen- I give him 5 years before he is dead.
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