VIOLENCE BETWEEN PRISONERS
Inmates who are attacked by other inmates face several unique problems: They are captives held against their will in the company of others who also desperately would like to be somewhere else. Yet the predicament facing nonviolent inmates is that they can’t escape interacting with dangerous persons under very difficult circumstances and adverse conditions. Also, injured parties generally are reluctant to report what happened to them to the officers guarding them for fear of being branded a “snitch.” “Squealing” is strictly for- bidden by the inmate code, a subculture that engulfs members of this society of captives. The penalty for informing on others can be death.
Worse yet, inmate-on-inmate resentment leading to violence is often motivated by the lowest com- mon denominator, which is an unchangeable characteristic: race/ethnicity. As a result, prisoners band together in race-based gangs for self- protection against each other. Added to this “watch your back” struggle to survive are other exacerbating factors: overcrowding; indifference or even hostility from corrections officers toward certain inmates or groups; cellmates suffering from mental illness; and cell blocks populated by angry people with violent tempers, short fuses, and his- tories of violence.
It is well known that when large numbers of criminally inclined men are held against their will, they vent their anger and frustration on each other. Inmates target one another in a number of ways, including thefts of their meager possessions, extor- tion, assaults with homemade weapons, and gang fights (see Silberman, 1995; Schneider, 1996; and O’Connell and Straub, 1999). But the worst expressions of violence born of frustration—sexual assaults and murders (fatal beatings and stabbings)— are receiving renewed attention from corrections administrations intent on running orderly institu- tions. It is in the public’s enlightened self-interest to quell and prevent inmate-on-inmate violence, and to offer programs and services for self- improvement while they are in the government’s custody. Most individuals kept behind bars will be released someday. If formerly incarcerated persons receive the assistance they need during reentry, they have a chance at leading productive and law- abiding lives. If they are more bitter and hostile when they leave jails and prisons than when they entered, their recidivism will create another wave of victims.
Even worse than being forcibly raped (refer back to Chapter 10) is to be murdered while ostensibly under the government’s care and control. Controversies often break out when sus- pects, defendants, and convicts die while in the custody of law enforcement agencies (police sta- tion lockups), the courts (holding pens), or the correctional system (jails, prisons, and juvenile facilities). Some deaths might be attributed to
AD D IT ION AL GROUP S OF V I C T IMS WIT H SPE C IAL P ROB L EMS 399
Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203
medical conditions (heart attacks and strokes), drug abuse (overdoses or adverse reactions), sui- cides, or the use of necessary force by officers during an escape attempt. But some of the deceased were killed by fellow inmates over some personal “beef” or as a result of gang rival- ries carried over from the streets but heightened by the frustrations of confinement. Researchers were unable to estimate the comparative risks of death from illnesses, suicides, and violence until Congress officially rediscovered the existence of homicides behind bars and passed the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act of 2000.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics was assigned the task of maintaining a database about all fatali- ties while in custody, whether under suspicious circumstances or not. The information includes the gender, race/ethnicity, and age of the deceased; the date, time, and location of the inci- dent; and a brief narrative about the circumstances. Focusing on homicides (as opposed to the major causes of deaths—illnesses and suicides), a compi- lation of records from jails across the country for the years 2000–2012 revealed that the number of deaths from inmate-on-inmate violence ranged from a low of 15 in 2003 to a high of 36 in 2006. During 2012, 22 jail inmates were victims of homicide, which comprised only about 2 per- cent of all deaths in jails that year and yielded a mortality rate of about 3 per 100,000. (Suicide was the leading cause of death of persons kept for up to a year in jails, claiming 40 lives out of every 100,000 inmates.) As for persons incarcerated in state prisons, the death toll for the period 2001– 2012 was a little over 670; slightly more than 100 were slain in penal institutions run by the federal government. The body count ranged from a low of 39 in 2001 to a high of 85 in 2012, indicating a disturbing upward trend in lethal violence. Those 85 inmates murdered by fellow prisoners accounted for less than 3 percent of all deaths of felons behind bars that year (most died from ill- nesses or suicide). But the 2012 homicide rate of about 7 per 100,000 per year was the highest recorded since the monitoring program began in 2000 (Noonan and Ginder, 2014).
As always, location plays a role in determining differential risks. The level of violence within the institutions’ walls varied greatly from state to state. For the years from 2001 to 2012 combined, the homicide rate for all state prisons averaged out to 4 inmates slain for every 100,000 confined per year; for the federal penitentiaries, it was 5 per 100,000 annually. The most dangerous state prison systems for the years from 2001 to 2012 were located in Oklahoma (14 homicides per 100,000 inmates annually), Maryland (11), New Mexico (9), Tennessee (9), South Carolina (8), Maine (8), and California (8). The safest states to be locked up in were in Minnesota, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Wyoming (all with virtually zero) (Noonan and Ginder, 2014). To put these figures into context, the num- bers ought to be close to zero, since the govern- ment is responsible for the well-being of the people it confines against their will. On the other hand, the murder rates of incarcerated per- sons were somewhat lower than the homicide rate for “average Americans” in the rest of the country each year until 2012. Slayings behind bars appear to be the only kind of murders that currently are on the rise in the United States.
As for the demographics of the local jail inmates who were stabbed or beaten to death or killed in other ways, almost all were males (270 of the nearly 275 victims between 2000 and 2012). The highest risks of being slain were faced by men over 45, and especially over 55. Victimization rates by race and ethnicity were virtually the same. Most disturbing of all was their legal status: Nearly 200 (almost 75 percent) of the inmates killed while in jail had not yet been convicted of any crime; they were technically innocent and were being detained awaiting their trial. As for the demo- graphics of the convicted felons slain while serving time in prisons, the highest murder rates were suf- fered by inmates beyond the age of 45, and partic- ularly those older than 55, and the lowest by prisoners between the ages of 18 and 24. Only 4 of the approximately 670 victims were females; dif- ferences in rates by race and ethnicity were minor (Noonan and Ginder, 2014).
400 CH APT ER 11
Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203
When convicts are sentenced to prison, the administration classifies them in terms of their propensity to commit new acts of violence while incarcerated, and wardens supervise them in either maximum, medium, or minimum security facilities. But all inmates also could be rated in terms of their vulnerability to violent victimization while they are locked up. A risk assessment scale based on an actu- arial type of statistical analysis has determined the following factors to be the best predictors of being attacked, beaten, or stabbed: having ever been placed in segregation as a punishment, having been convicted of certain sex offenses, suffering from a mental illness, instigating others to engage in misconduct behind bars, holding other inmates in low regard, and turning to drugs to cope with stress. These factors were better predictors of becoming a target for physical assaults than age, race, marital status, education, or having a history of acting violently. Inmates with high scores on this risk assessment instrument need special supervision and protection if they are to avoid violent victimi- zation and undergo successful rehabilitation and treatment while in confinement (Labrecque et al., 2014). Similarly, large jail systems with high turn- over rates need to do a better job of rapidly identi- fying vulnerable inmates before they are attacked or slashed, especially since an increasing number of people in short-term confinement have undiag- nosed and untreated mental problems that cause them to respond to tense situations defiantly or erratically (see Schwirtz, 2014).
More detailed statistical profiles of the deceased inmates and their killers are needed to figure out where, when, and why these slayings happen to determine the circumstances that would heighten the risks that a prisoner will be beaten or stabbed to death with homemade weapons, either by vin- dictive or deranged individuals or by ethnically based, organized prison gangs, and to examine what specifically can be done in the future to pre- vent such needless loss of life of convicts but also especially of detainees awaiting trial while under governmental custody, who under the law are to be considered innocent unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.