Even though he has yet to be sentenced and sent to the prison where he will serve his time, O.J. Simpson is already a marked man. The National Enquirer has interviewed legal insiders that said O.J. is going to have an extremely rough time and should expect to spend a good deal of it in solitary confinement – not out of punishment but for his own safety. The effect is still nearly the same though.

Members of the Aryan Warriors have already threatened Simpson’s life. They’re an enormous and very powerful gang throughout the prison system. The Enquirer also claims Simpson is suicidal and under constant surveillance. His situation certainly sounds grim. It seems like either he’s a dead man because of someone else of by his own hands.

“I’m a dead man!” the disgraced gridiron great declared when he phoned pals shortly after his conviction. Even as he sat in his dank Las Vegas jail cell just hours after jurors found him guilty of armed robbery and kidnapping, guards worried he would be marked for death. For his own safety, he was put in an isolation cell dubbed “the hole” by prisoners.

“He’s scared to death – so much so that he won’t eat, and he has been given medication for depression,” disclosed a source. Simpson has plummeted to such depths of despair, revealed an insider, “he was put on suicide watch. Someone is watching him nearly every minute in case he tries to strangle himself with whatever he can find in his cell.”

“O.J. has two major things working against him as he heads to prison – he killed two white people and he’s a celebrity,” a Nevada prison system insider told the Enquirer. “He’s a target for the Aryan Warriors, a very powerful and deadly prison gang whose members want to finally deliver O.J. fatal justice. They’re waiting for him to arrive – it’s going to be like tossing meat to the wolves. He’ll be dead within weeks.”

[From the National Enquirer, Oct. 20, 2008, print ed.]

Simpson being on antidepressants isn’t that unusual. I have a friend who’s a social worker in the mental health unit of an L.A. prison and she said almost everyone in the entire system is on at least anti-depressants just to get through the experience.

It definitely sounds like O.J.’s life is clearly in danger. Being a celebrity is always super dangerous in prison. I cannot even imagine what would have happened to Michael Jackson had he been convicted. O.J. definitely has a rocky road ahead of him.

The pessimistic part of me thinks he’ll probably end up serving such a small amount of real time that it won’t matter. But no matter what, he’s sure going to cost the state of Las Vegas a lot of money between all the extra security he’s going to require. If nothing else, he deserves to do his time. I’ve always thought a long prison sentence would be much harder than death.

Here’s Simpson at Johnnie Cochran’s funeral in 2005. Images thanks to Bauer-Griffin.