IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jcjust/v38yi4p348-358.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Inmate homicides: Killers, victims, motives, and circumstances

Author

Listed:
  • Cunningham, Mark D.
  • Sorensen, Jon R.
  • Vigen, Mark P.
  • Woods, S.O.

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Cunningham, Mark D. & Sorensen, Jon R. & Vigen, Mark P. & Woods, S.O., 2010. "Inmate homicides: Killers, victims, motives, and circumstances," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 348-358, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jcjust:v:38:y::i:4:p:348-358
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047-2352(10)00056-5
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Vaughn, Michael G. & DeLisi, Matt & Gunter, Tracy & Fu, Qiang & Beaver, Kevin M. & Perron, Brian E. & Howard, Matthew O., 2011. "The Severe 5%: A Latent Class Analysis of the Externalizing Behavior Spectrum in the United States," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 75-80.
    2. Sorensen, Jon R. & Cunningham, Mark D. & Vigen, Mark P. & Woods, S.O., 2011. "Serious assaults on prison staff: A descriptive analysis," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 143-150.
    3. Caudill, Jonathan W. & Trulson, Chad R. & Marquart, James W. & Patten, Ryan & Thomas, Matthew O. & Anderson, Sally, 2014. "Correctional destabilization and jail violence: The consequences of prison depopulation legislation," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 42(6), pages 500-506.
    4. Behnken, Monic P. & Caudill, Jonathan W. & Berg, Mark T. & Trulson, Chad R. & DeLisi, Matt, 2011. "Marked for Death: An Empirical Criminal Careers Analysis of Death Sentences in a Sample of Convicted Male Homicide Offenders," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 39(6), pages 471-478.
    5. Sorensen, Jon & Davis, Jaya, 2011. "Violent criminals locked up: Examining the effect of incarceration on behavioral continuity," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 151-158.
    6. DeLisi, Matt & Piquero, Alex R., 2011. "New frontiers in criminal careers research, 2000-2011: A state-of-the-art review," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 39(4), pages 289-301, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jcjust:v:38:y::i:4:p:348-358. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jcrimjus .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.