Inmate homicides: Killers, victims, motives, and circumstances

Despite popular media depictions, prison homicides are quite infrequent, averaging only four per one hundred thousand inmates annually in U.S. prisons during the current decade and declining over 90 percent in the past thirty years. Only a handful of studies had examined this most serious form of institutional violence. This study examined thirty-five inmate homicides, involving fifty-two perpetrators, occurring in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for 2000-2008. The majority of homicides occurred in inmates’ cells, involved a single assailant, resulted from beatings, or was cross-racial. Often multiple motivations for the homicides were present. Hispanic inmates were overrepresented as perpetrators and victims. Perpetrators and victims were overwhelmingly male, and likely to have records of violent arrests and problematic prison adjustments. A substantial proportion of both perpetrators and victims had suspected or confirmed gang affiliations. Perpetrators were differentiated from victims by younger age, higher IQ scores, greater educational attainment, and sentences for armed robbery.