| In 1977 the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) entered into a consent decree, Lamar v. Coffield (1977), that mandated the end of racially segregating inmates in the Texas Prison System. Despite over a decade of organizational resistance to the stipulations of the consent decree, in September 1991 the Texas Prison System began racially integrating offenders in-cells to bring about the "maximum possible integrationof cells consonant with the factors of security, control and rehabilitation." In the present paper, access was granted to all prison records and court documents on Lamar v. Coffield, including a database of all incidents between two or more inmates in the Texas Prison System. The incidents that make up the database are recorded on what the prison system has labeled an Incident Data Form (IDF), and included in the database are all incidents between two or ore inmates from October 1988 until January 2000. Of particular interest on the Incident Data Form is whether or not the incident crossed racial lines, involved cell partners, and if the incident was "racially motivated" in nature. With this data spanning over ten years and in including over 50,000 incidents, we examine the prevalence of inter-racial inmate incidents in the Texas Prison System following racial in-cell integration and compare those to inmate intra-racial incidents. Included in this paper is a detailed timeline of the Lamar litigation that has spanned nearly three decades. |
Updated 05/20/2006