Ariel Castro, who held three girls captive for as long as 10 years, has accepted a plea deal that spares him the death chamber in Ohio.

He’s heading to the slammer for the rest of his life.

Some of my friends have chimed in on social media in the past few hours about the deal and what it means for Castro. They’ve invoked the name of another monster, one Jeffrey Dahmer, suggesting Castro could meet the same fate as the late Wisconsin Cannibal.

Dahmer was thrown into prison in the 1990s after it was revealed he had killed and actually eaten many of his victims, some of whom were children. Wisconsin hasn’t had the death penalty since 1853. So, when Dahmer was sent away to serve a life sentence in prison, the state’s prison authorities threw him to the wolves, so to speak.

Dahmer was sent into the general population. He was attacked twice by inmates. The second time took him out. He was beaten to death in November 1994.

This is one of those things no one has yet been able to prove, but I’ve long believed that Wisconsin officials knew Dahmer’s life would end that way when they sent him to live among the rest of the bad guys. Absent a death penalty, what the state got — if you’ll pardon the expression — was the next best thing.

Ariel Castro would have faced a death sentence had he been convicted of murdering his victims’ unborn children, which he had been accused of doing. The state would sought the death penalty and likely would have succeeded had Castro taken his case to court.

Now, though, he’s spared himself a one-way trip to the Ohio death chamber with a guilty plea. He’ll spend his the rest of his days in prison.

Will he meet the same fate as Jeffrey Dahmer? That will depend on whether Ohio prison authorities separate him from the rest of his new “friends.” 

If he’s forced to live among ’em, well, as the saying goes: Karma’s a bitch.